Abstract
To deal with the question of what a sociable robot is, we describe how an educational robot is encountered by children, teachers and designers in a preschool. We consider the importance of the robot’s body by focusing on how its movements are contingently embedded in interactional situations. We point out that the effects of agency that these movements generate are inseparable from their grounding in locally coordinated, multimodal actions and interactions.
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Notes
- 1.
Since this process of design and construction is meant to respond, at least in part, to the preschool visits, its contingencies do not only concern the work of the roboticists but also the classroom’s interactions between the children and their teachers.
- 2.
Each of the RUBI robots can be mapped on a “project” ([10], pp. 53–80) as it participates in organizing laboratory practices within a temporal context. The appearance of the project’s unity and sequential organization is achieved through local production and in situ activities of obtaining funding, responding to grant cycles, writing up results, as well as designing and building physical instantiations of the robotic machine.
- 3.
Setting for activity is repeatedly experienced, personally ordered and edited version of a more durable and physically, economically, socially organized space-in-time ([13], p. 71).
- 4.
Developmental psychologists point out that engagements with attention-organizing behavior start to rapidly evolve from the end of the child’s first year and early into the second year. They link these attention-organizing behaviors with the capacity of intention-attribution, and consider them to be a prerequisite for the development of human language.
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Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Mayumi Bono, Yelena Gluzman, Charles Goodwin, John Haviland, Shimako Iwasaki, Michael Lynch, Maurizio Marchetti, Susanna Messier, Aug Nishizaka, Paul Ruvolo, Masaki Suwa, Cynthia Taylor, Paul Ruvolo and the participants in the ethnographic study for their contribution to this paper.
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Alač, M., Movellan, J., Malmir, M. (2014). Grounding a Sociable Robot’s Movements in Multimodal, Situational Engagements. In: Nakano, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8417. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10061-6_18
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