I have had the opportunity to meet with Hideki Kozima and listen to him do a talk on Keepon and various other robots. The breakthrough here is the usage of the robots in therapy; Keepon was very successful at helping researchers understand human-robot interaction when it was placed in a Japanese daycare/therapy centre that helped autistic children. When placed within a "normal" daycare, the children bonded with Keepon almost instantly....quite different from the therapy centre.
It is important to note that Keepon was operated via a human operator for these two situations. The environment was too complex to program for. However, Keepon does have programming to operate autonomously when it is in a simpler environment (i.e. single child interaction).
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I have had the opportunity to meet with Hideki Kozima and listen to him do a talk on Keepon and various other robots. The breakthrough here is the usage of the robots in therapy; Keepon was very successful at helping researchers understand human-robot interaction when it was placed in a Japanese daycare/therapy centre that helped autistic children. When placed within a "normal" daycare, the children bonded with Keepon almost instantly....quite different from the therapy centre.
It is important to note that Keepon was operated via a human operator for these two situations. The environment was too complex to program for. However, Keepon does have programming to operate autonomously when it is in a simpler environment (i.e. single child interaction).