"I'm Scared": Little Children Reject Robots

Abstract

Social robots are used for interacting with children. Their novelty often stimulates the interest of children and encourages such interaction as playing with them. However, some children do not interact with such robots and instead strongly reject interaction with them. Understanding such rejection behaviors of children has important design implications for social robots that are supposed to interact with children. For this purpose, we investigated what kinds of rejection behaviors appeared in different kinds of robots in a play room environment.