Emergence of turn-taking in unstructured child-robot social interactions

The `Sandtray' has been designed as a platform to examine social interactions in which the interaction is not constrained a priori. A pilot study has been conducted with children to assess the suitability of the Sandtray for social HRI studies, using a wizard-of-oz robot control scheme. One aspect of importance is whether the children (previously unfamiliar with both the robot and the Sandtray) regard the robot as a potential social agent, or whether the Sandtray itself is of greater interactional interest. In this paper, observations on the children's behaviour with respect to the robot are reported. It is shown that the children engage in a turn-taking strategy, even though there is no such constraint imposed by the task, or by the behaviour of the robot. This indicates that in this context, the robot is viewed as a social agent.