Lessons From RUBI
“Kenka,” says a childlike voice. “Ken-ka.”
Standing on a polka-dot carpet at a preschool on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, a robot named RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-old boy.
RUBI looks like a desktop computer come to life: its screen-torso, mounted on a pair of shoes, sprouts mechanical arms and a lunchbox-size head, fitted with video cameras, a microphone and voice capability. RUBI wears a bandanna around its neck and a fixed happy-face smile, below a pair of large, plastic eyes.
It picks up a white sneaker and says kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, before returning it to the floor. “Feel it; I’m a kenka.”
In a video of this exchange, the boy picks up the sneaker, says “kenka, kenka” — and holds up the shoe for the robot to see.
In person they are not remotely humanlike, most of today’s social robots. Some speak well, others not at all. Some move on two legs, others on wheels. Many look like escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys.
They make for very curious company. The University of Southern California robot used with autistic children tracks a person throughout a room, approaching indirectly and pulling up just short of personal space, like a cautious child hoping to join a playground game.
The machine’s only words are exclamations (“Uh huh” for those drawing near; “Awww” for those moving away). Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that some living thing is close by. That sensation, however vague, is enough to facilitate a real exchange of information, researchers say.
In the San Diego classroom where RUBI has taught Finnish, researchers are finding that the robot enables preschool children to score significantly better on tests, compared with less interactive learning, as from tapes.
Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.” Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms.‘The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children,” said Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of AnthroTronix, a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with developmentally delayed children. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”
The RUBI team hit upon a solution one part mechanical and two parts psychological. The engineers programmed RUBI to cry when its arms were pulled. Its young playmates quickly backed off at the sound.
If the sobbing continued, the children usually shifted gears and came forward — to deliver a hug.
Re-armed and newly sensitive, RUBI was ready to test as a teacher. In a paper published last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Joensuu in Finland found that the robot significantly improved the vocabulary of nine toddlers.
After testing the youngsters’ knowledge of 20 words and introducing them to the robot, the researchers left RUBI to operate on its own. The robot showed images on its screen and instructed children to associate them with words.
After 12 weeks, the children’s knowledge of the 10 words taught by RUBI increased significantly, while their knowledge of 10 control words did not. “The effect was relatively large, a reduction in errors of more than 25 percent,” the authors concluded.
Researchers in social robotics — a branch of computer science devoted to enhancing communication between humans and machines — at Honda Labs in Mountain View, Calif., have found a similar result with their robot, a three-foot character called Asimo, which looks like a miniature astronaut. In one 20-minute session the machine taught grade-school students how to set a table — improving their accuracy by about 25 percent, a recent study found.
At the University of Southern California, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with children with autism. In a pilot study, four children with the diagnosis spent about 30 minutes with this robot when it was programmed to be socially engaging and another half-hour when it behaved randomly, more like a toy. The results are still preliminary, said David Feil-Seifer, who ran the study, but suggest that the children spoke more often and spent more time in direct interaction when the robot was responsive, compared with when it acted randomly.