This paper presents a contribution aiming at testing novel child–robot teaching schemes that could be used in future studies to support the development of social and collaborative skills of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We present a novel experiment where the classical roles are reversed: in this scenario the children are the teachers providing positive or negative reinforcement to the Kaspar robot in order for it to learn arbitrary associations between different toy names and the locations where they are positioned. The objective is to stimulate interaction and collaboration between children while teaching the robot, and also provide them tangible examples to understand that sometimes learning requires several repetitions. To facilitate this game, we developed a reinforcement learning algorithm enabling Kaspar to verbally convey its level of uncertainty during the learning process, so as to better inform the children about the reasons behind its successes and failures. Overall, 30 typically developing (TD) children aged between 7 and 8 (19 girls, 11 boys) and 9 children with ASD performed 25 sessions (16 for TD; 9 for ASD) of the experiment in groups, and managed to teach Kaspar all associations in 2 to 7 trials. During the course of study Kaspar only made rare unexpected associations (2 perseverative errors and 2 win-shifts, within a total of 314 trials), primarily due to exploratory choices, and eventually reached minimal uncertainty. Thus, the robot’s behaviour was clear and consistent for the children, who all expressed enthusiasm in the experiment.

中文翻译：

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一种新颖的基于补强的范式，用于儿童教学人形Kaspar机器人

本文提出了一项旨在测试新型儿童机器人教学计划的贡献，该计划可用于未来的研究中，以支持自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童的社交和协作技能的发展。我们提出了一个新颖的实验，将经典角色颠倒了：在这种情况下，孩子们是为Kaspar机器人提供正面或负面强化的老师，以便它学习不同玩具名称和它们放置位置之间的任意关联。目的是在教机器人时激发孩子之间的互动和协作，并向他们提供具体的例子，以了解有时学习需要多次重复。为方便游戏，我们开发了一种强化学习算法，可使Kaspar在学习过程中口头传达其不确定性水平，以便更好地告知孩子其成功和失败背后的原因。总体而言，有30名7至8岁的典型发育（TD）儿童（19名女孩，11名男孩）和9名ASD儿童进行了25节实验（TD为16； ASD为9），并成功地教给了Kaspar 2至7个试验中的关联。在研究过程中，Kaspar仅由于罕见的探索性选择而产生了罕见的意外关联（2个持久性错误和2个获胜转移，总共314次试验），主要是由于探索性选择，最终达到了最小的不确定性。因此，对于所有表示对实验充满热情的孩子，机器人的行为是清晰且一致的。