Interaction design for an enjoyable play interaction with a small humanoid robot

Robots designed to act as companions are expected to be able to interact with people in an enjoyable fashion. In particular, our aim is to enable small companion robots to respond in a pleasant way when people pick them up and play with them. To this end, we developed a gesture recognition system capable of recognizing play gestures which involve a person moving a small humanoid robot\´s full body ("full-body gestures"). However, such recognition by itself is not enough to provide a nice interaction. We find that interactions with an initial, naive version of our system frequently fail. The question then becomes: what more is required? I.e., what sort of design is required in order to create successful interactions? To answer this question, we analyze typical failures which occur and compile a list of guidelines. Then, we implement this model in our robot, proposing strategies for how a robot can provide "reward" and suggest goals for the interaction. As a consequence, we conduct a validation experiment. We find that our interaction design with "persisting intentions" can be used to establish an enjoyable play interaction.