Toddlers Sing With RUBI

By Roland Piquepaille

At the University of California - San Diego (UCSD), two robots are attending nursery school to teach songs, colors and shapes to one- and two-year old children. QRIO (for "Quest for Curiosity") from Sony, and RUBI (for "Robot Using Bayesian Inference"), developed at the Machine Perception Laboratory of UCSD, are there to study the uses of interactive computers for early childhood education. "RUBI is a three foot tall, pleasantly plump robot with a head and two arms. It stands on four non-motorized rubber wheels for moving it easily from place to place." Preliminary results show that the children like the robots, and even hug them -- until they're bored. Read more...

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Led by Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Lab, the study, known as the RUBI Project, is a collaborative endeavor with R&D organization Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc.

Below is a picture of RUBI with Kai Movellan (Credit: UCSD).

The current appearance of RUBI was chosen by Kai Movellan, the 2 year old child on the picture. Kai refused to interact with the early versions of RUBI and proved to be a great critic for the design team.

Here are more details about RUBI.

Soft, warm and pleasantly plump (with a slight tendency to boxiness), the three-foot-tall RUBI has a head, two arms and is mounted on four non-motorized wheels for ease of transportation. She has two cameras for eyes and a third, omni-directional camera, for peripheral vision, mounted on an antenna on her back. Five high-powered CPUs form her body; an additional cluster of 24, back at the lab, are used for experiments that help her learn and progress. Currently, RUBI is capable of tracking heads and detecting faces and basic expressions.

And when RUBI teaches children songs or plays interactive games with her, it's not unusual for kids to hug the robots, as the picture below shows (Credit: UCSD).

And what's next at the nursery school for these robots?

Next targets for RUBI -- who was designed to be built up by one or two components at a time, in accordance with results of the field observations -- include being able to point, hold the children's hands and hug them back.

The experiments started in March 2005 for QRIO and in April for RUBI. Whatever the results, it seems that everyone, from kids to teachers to researchers, is enjoying the experience.

Tickling RUBI's sensitive TV belly so she giggles produces laughs from the people too. And, each time QRIO lays down on the floor at the end of a session for system shutdown, it draws a small crowd and a queue forms to cover him with a blanket and wish him "night-night."

For more information about RUBI, here are two links to unpublished papers, "The RUBI Project: Origins, Principles, and First Steps" (PDF format, 7 pages, 579 KB) and "RUBI: A Robotic Platform for Real-time Social Interaction" (PDF format, 13 pages, 283 KB). The images above were extracted from these documents

Sources: UCSD news release, via EurekAlert!, June 22, 2005; and various UCSD sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Education
  
• Human Computer Interface
  
• Robotics
  
• Software