Qrio - Nursery School Retard?

Robot attends nursery school in California - World - www.theage.com.au

A humanoid robot developed by a Sony Corp subsidiary has been attending a nursery school in California since March to play with children up to 2 years of age.

The experiment is hoped to help develop a robot that can "live in harmony with humans in the future".

Hello
Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc's Qrio robot spends time each day with more than 10 toddlers at the nursery school located in San Diego.

While the children were at first apprehensive about the automatically moving Qrio, they became fully used to it in about a month, according to Sony Intelligence.
They now dance with Qrio and help it get up when it falls.

"It seems (the children) think of (Qrio) as a feeble younger brother," Tanaka said.

Disturbing the class?

Based on observations over the past month, Tanaka said he believes a robot needs to have two contradictory functions to be able to live in harmony with humans - one for making "timely responses to human approaches" and the other for showing "unexpected, accidental moves".

He said a robot should have the two functions in a well-balanced manner.

- Kyodo

Robot attends nursery school in California - World - www.theage.com.au