Better together: young children's tendencies to help a non-humanoid robot collaborator

In child-robot collaborations, a robot may fail to accomplish its part of a task. In this situation, the robot is reliant on the child to recover. Inherently prosocial, a child is inclined to help the robot collaborator if the child can properly identify the robot failure and infer how to help correct it. In this study, we investigate how a non-humanoid robot can solicit the help of a child-collaborator using only its motion path. We conducted a study with twenty-two children, ages 3-7, who participated in a collaborative building task with a non-humanoid mobile robot. We found that autonomous motion of a non-humanoid robot elicited prosocial behavior from 59% of children, and that young children were willing to engage with the robot as an animate partner despite its limited capabilities and form. This finding has implications for robot design striving to encourage prosocial behavior in children of different ages.