A Playful Robot for Research, Therapy, and Entertainment

Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed for simple, natural, nonverbal interaction with children. The minimal design of Keepon's appearance and behavior is meant to intuitively and comfortably convey the robot's ex- pressions of attention and emotion. For the past few years, we have been observing interactions between Keepon and children at various levels of physical, mental, and social de- velopment. With typically developing children, we have ob- served varying styles of play that suggest a progression in ontological understanding of the robot. With children suffer- ing from developmental disorders such as autism, we have observed interactive behaviors that suggest Keepon's design is effective in eliciting a motivation to share mental states. Finally, in developing technology for interpersonal coordi- nation and interactional synchrony, we have observed an im- portant role of rhythm in establishing engagement between people and robots. This paper presents a comprehensive sur- vey of work done with Keepon to date.

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