Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed to interact with children by directing attention and expressing emotion.
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BeatBots company was founded in 2007 by Marek Michalowski, a doctoral student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Dr. Hideki Kozima, formerly a Senior Research Scientist at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and currently a professor at Miyagi University. The two worked together on Keepon, a robot used for more than five years in peer-reviewed research on social development and interpersonal coordination as well as in therapeutic practice for children with developmental disorders such as autism.
Human social behaviour shares much in common with dance. Our speech and the movement of our body, head, and hands, is periodic and rhythmic. Social scientists such as William S. Condon and Adam Kendon have identified interactional synchrony as a phenomenon that plays an important role in the regulation and coordination of movements, vocalizations, and other social interactions. BeatBots have been developing technology to allow robots like Keepon to synchronize with these social rhythms in their interactions.
Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed to interact with children by directing attention and expressing emotion. Keepon’s minimal design makes its behaviours easy to understand, resulting in interactions that are enjoyable and comfortable—particularly important in BeatBots's research on human social development.
Keepon has soft rubber skin, cameras in its eyes, a microphone in its nose, and it has four degrees of freedom. Attention is directed by turning +/-180° and nodding +/-40°, while emotion is expressed by rocking side-to-side +/-25° and bobbing up to 15mm.
Keepon has been used since 2003 in research on social development and communication. The company has studied behaviours such as eye-contact, joint attention, touching, emotion, and imitation between Keepon and children of different ages and levels of social development. In the case of children with autism and other developmental disorders, the studies show very good results with the use of Keepon as a tool for therapists, paediatricians, and parents to observe, study, and facilitate social interactions. ■