Escaping from Children’s Abuse of Social Robots

Social robots working in public space often stimulate children's curiosity. However, sometimes children also show abusive behavior toward robots. In our case studies, we observed in many cases that children persistently obstruct the robot's activity. Some actually abused the robot by saying bad things, and at times even kicking or punching the robot. We developed a statistical model of occurrence of children's abuse. Using this model together with a simulator of pedestrian behavior, we enabled the robot to predict the possibility of an abuse situation and escape before it happens. We demonstrated that with the model the robot successfully lowered the occurrence of abuse in a real shopping mall. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Interaction styles; I.2.9 [Artificial Intelligence]: Robotics, General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.

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