Studying Child-Mother Interactions to Design Robots with Social Skills

At the University of Miami scientist are examining 13 mothers and their babies in the age group of 1 to 6 months to try and discover the secrets of the human cognitive development. Face to face interactions between mother and child were studied in the first phase.

The psychologists hope to use patterns of nonverbal emotional communication between infants and mothers to develop a baby robot that can learn as the human one does.

The unravelled mysteries will then be used by the combination of developmental psychologists from the University of Miami and computer scientists from the University of California to make a robot capable of learning social skills.

The robot on whom the test will be carried out is called Diego - San. He is 1.3 meters tall and modeled after a 1-year-old child. The construction of the robot was a joint venture between Kokoro Dreams and the Machine Perception Laboratory at UC San Diego.