“That Robot Played with Us!” Children’s Perceptions of a Robot after a Child-Robot Group Interaction

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The design of child-centred, intelligent and collaborative robots is a challenging endeavour, which requires to understand how the implemented robot behaviours and collaboration paradigms affect children's perception about the robot. This paper presents the results of a set of semi-structured interviews of N=81, 5 to 8 years old children who previously interacted in pairs with a robot in the context of a problem-solving task. We manipulated two different factors of the robot behaviour: cognitive reliability in logic game movements (optimal vs sub-optimal) and expressivity in the communication (expressive vs neutral) and we assigned the children in one of the four conditions. At post-intervention interviews, we examined children's perceptions on the robot's attributions, collaboration and social role. Results indicate that a robot's cognitive reliability shapes the helping relationship between the children and the robot, while the robot's expressivity impacts children perception of the robot supportive ability and friendship. Finally, results also indicate that, even if children interact in pairs with the robot, their perceptions about it remain individual, although a good collective task-performance seems to empower children perception of the robot in terms of friendship and reliability.