Integrating robots into children's spaces demands careful attention to the likelihood that children may disclose information indicating that their welfare is at risk. To consider the active involvement of social robots in safeguarding children, we interviewed 22 community stakeholders who work with children professionally in education, social services, healthcare or legal services in the UK and the USA. All stakeholders saw value in having robots create playful, safe spaces that can help alleviate the anxiety and reduce the emotional burden of the safeguarding process. However, they worried about a robot's ability to handle disclosures, interpret context and not overburden welfare services. We present hypothetical roles that robots could adopt within the safeguarding pipeline and map them to design considerations that emphasise the need for relational understanding, structured thresholds, and transparent data collection. Together, these considerations provide directions for ethical, child-centred robot technologies in safeguarding youth.

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research in real-world settings may lead to unanticipated, emotionally charged moments. While impacts of these moments on participants are reported in the literature, researchers’ emotions, which can affect participants’ experiences, are often left unreported. Learning from these moments is essential for advancing HRI quality and real-world deployment success. We introduce "Emotional Entanglements" as a lens in HRI to define a researcher's capacity to anticipate, absorb, respond to, and recover from emotionally impactful events. Collecting testimonials using collaborative autoethnography from eleven researchers, we surface recurring emotional entanglements experienced in HRI studies, including tears with mixed meaning, participant attachment and loss upon robot withdrawal, and consequential participant decisions attributed to the robot, as well as how researchers navigated them amidst protocol constraints. This paper provides an actionable guide to "Emotional Sustainability in HRI", raising awareness of these often unreported situations and offering strategies for mitigation.

As we introduce social robots into family homes, there is a heightened need to understand both parental and child perceptions of privacy, taking into account family perspectives. Haru4Kids (H4K) is an app-based robot simulator designed to cohabitate with children in their home. In a multi-site investigation, H4K cohabitated with 11 American, 11 Spanish, and 10 Ukrainian families. Interviews preceding and following the cohabitation period with at least one parent and all participating children ages 5–12 allowed us to gauge general expectations and experiences during cohabitation and to estimate their comfort with sharing different kinds of information with the platform. In general, children perceived Haru as a technological device that was social, yet non-human. All stakeholders were more comfortable with general information collection as opposed to information sharing with third parties. Lastly, though culture is known to affect expectations and perceptions of privacy and robots, our study shows cohabitating with H4K led to a general convergence across sites in users’ perceptions of Haru and attitudes towards preserving their privacy with robots.

Working with children in human-robot interaction (HRI) research presents novel challenges that require thoughtful preparation and reflection.However, given that HRI is still an emerging field of research, there is limited guidance for early-career HRI researchers focusing on child-robot interaction.We present a practical guide to working with children and robots, tailored for early-career researchers whome we refer to throughout as 'roboticists.'We pose several questions to encourage reflection and consideration for working with children, and other vulnerable populations, when designing and testing robots.The goal of this guide is to provide a resource for early-career roboticists when designing human-robot interaction studies that include children.We structure our guide to reflect on three research phases-pre-study, study, and post-studyand address critical questions regarding ethics, logistics, and inclusive communication.With this WiP report, we hope to receive feedback from the IDC community and establish collaborations to improve the proposed guide.In future work, we plan to collect testimonials from roboticists to diversify and expand the practical insights into a more comprehensive practical guide.

The increasing presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems geared towards children necessitates those who design and develop these technologies to understand how to address the emerging ethical questions in their development and use while maintaining a playful, child-friendly approach.Even more importantly, it is crucial to understand how we can address various tensions that have emerged among ethical principles.In this half-day workshop, keynote talks, poster presentations and interactive, "playful by design" will promote hands-on and rights-based design experiences for researchers and practitioners to ideate the benefits and challenges of designing playful and ethical child-AI systems.

As robots enter our homes and workplaces, they will have more direct access to us, our information, and our daily lives. The more a robot knows about us, the more helpful it can be, at least in theory. Where is the balance between privacy and utility? How might the robot communicate the tradeoffs between privacy and utility in a nuanced but clear manner? How can we ensure that the perception of privacy-protection offered by the robot accurately reflects how much the robot is actually preserving our privacy? How can a robot learn information that it can use to better help us without being intrusive? What behaviors should the robot have (or not have) to not only ensure that it protects our privacy, but also is perceived as protecting our privacy? How can we measure the effectiveness of these behaviors, so that we can track our progress towards more useful, less invasive robot companions? This workshop is the the third in a series at HRI, and will bring together researchers from a wide variety of intellectual communities to look at these questions, identify promising research directions, and set an agenda for how to start making progress. We are particularly interested in expanding the core of researchers interested in privacy-related issues in HRI, and in those “privacy-curious” researchers who want to find out more about he intersection of privacy and their own research.

One of the biggest concerns voiced by families about child-centered robots in homes is privacy. My work uses co-design to better understand how youth, their family, and their clinicians formalize a youth's right to privacy with social robots. In particular, I highlight teen voices who are often overlooked in HRI. My main takeaways emphasize how the unique positioning of a robot as a non-authoritative, yet prosocial ‘other’ presence means stakeholders have lower perceptions of privacy when data collection and sharing is clearly defined by the robot's task. Furthermore, a social robot is situated among a teen's pre-existing relationships and responsibilities, framing privacy with robots from a relational perspective and elevating the need to clearly define the appropriate social roles for robots. In future work, I will couple these takeaways with youth's lived experiences with robots to see how privacy is contextualized further by the use of social robots in youth spaces.

Privacy is an important yet understudied focus in consideration of successful human-robot interaction (HRI). In this paper, we present a thematic analysis of the topics discussed in the Privacy-Aware Robotics Workshop held at the HRI Conference in 2024. The analysis points across the perspectives of User, Engineering, and Society with particular identification of open “interdisciplinary zones” at the intersections of these perspectives. Based on that, we formulate and present three main themes for future research directions: the tension between robot functioning and effectiveness of privacy implementations in real-world contexts; the need to involve and empower target user communities in the co-design of privacy-aware robots, and the consideration of regulatory frameworks that extend across jurisdictions in robot design.

Forming friendship with peers from diverse backgrounds is key to children’s social emotional development. In this study, we explored the use of social robot, Haru, as mediator for remote communication in children group, to support connection and friendship building. We invited children from different countries aged from 10 to 15 to participate in two interaction sessions with peers from other countries, after which we conducted interviews with children from three countries, focusing on their experiences, and perceptions of the robot’s roles in the process. The findings indicated that social robot Haru effectively served as an icebreaker and entertainer; However, improvements are needed in conversation flow, transitions between different roles, and supporting children’s autonomy in guiding the conversation and the depth of their communication.

Social robots are beginning to be utilized as part of the collective networks supporting pediatric treatment, however there are few studies on children's perceptions of these agents in hospitals from a privacy and safety perspective. Through a mixed-method and value-sensitive design approach, we introduced hypothetical vignettes and engaged in discussion with 15 youth who are either receiving cancer treatments or are in remission (ages 6-25), 11 of their parents, and 5 out of 8 of their clinical staff to learn how stakeholders in pediatric oncology discuss privacy concerns regarding child-robot interactions. Our thematic analysis imparts how stakeholders perceive robots as social, non-authoritative extensions of the hospital's care network. From this privacy-sensitive perspective, this study revealed that for maximizing a robot's social utility within care systems while critically engaging with the comfort and privacy preferences of stakeholders, robots should take on the role of 1) mediators of social interaction among various stakeholders, 2) companions for children and 3) informational tools for clinicians when consent is given by the family. We emphasize how assistive technologies in pediatrics should continue to be co-designed within communities for identifying appropriate roles and returning agency to stakeholders as they navigate the blurry boundaries of privacy in healthcare.

To investigate a robot’s role in children’s welfare and safety, we conducted interviews with 8 Subject Matter Experts and Professionals (SMEs) across the disciplines of robotics, child technology, psychology, and psychiatry disciplines. Through qualitative analysis, we synthesize the challenges of safeguarding, compounding limitations, and potential solutions for involving robots in safeguarding as broadly defined in SME interviews. While they agree robots should not be responsible for making judgement calls, the experts also identified the ways robots can be a valuable addition to the safeguarding team. However, more conversations spanning disciplines need to occur to inform policy and legal frameworks that will better establish a robot’s role in intimate spaces in children’s lives. While this line of inquiry is specific to robots in safeguarding, many of the themes reflect the nuances of finding appropriate places for child-robot interactions in the context of children’s welfare.

Though teens are a population with growing agency and use of smart technologies, their concerns surrounding privacy with AI and robots are under-represented in research. Using focus group discussions and a mixed methods analysis, we present teens' comfort levels with robotic information collection and sharing during three hypothetical scenarios involving a child interacting with the Haru social robot in the home. We find participant concerns align with an access-based definition of privacy which prioritizes being in control of their information and of when the robot behaves autonomously. Responses also indicate that teens conceptualize Haru not just as an intelligent device, but also as a social entity. Their shifts in comfort and discussions reflect an engagement in social relationship management with robots in the home in cases where the robot mediates a user's responsibilities and relationships with others.

Under UNICEF’s Policy guidance on AI for children, child-centered AI should always ‘ensure inclusion of and for children.’ To spotlight youth visions for robots, we led co-design workshops with children between 5-14 years old. Youth designs were expressive, customized, relatable, and approachable. Based on 54 drawings and descriptions of the social robot Haru, we suggest that future child-centered robots should 1) be expressive across verbal and non-verbal channels of communication, 2) allow for customization to give children more agency when interacting with the robot, 3) adapt to children’s style and hobbies to make them feel seen, and 4) aesthetically keep proportions of robot faces consistent and cartoon-like to make robots more approachable.

Haru4Kids (H4K) is a system that emulates the physical, social, family-oriented robot Haru, designed with the goal to cohabitate with children in their home for extended periods of time. Seven families kept H4K for two net weeks in their homes. Throughout this period of cohabitation, we collected user logs comprised of the children users ’ head angles, the rotation angles of the platform, and the actions taken by H4K as well as captured images which were afterwards hand-annotated to estimate user engagement. We report the trends of these external metrics that we collected during every session of interaction. We also developed an annotation tool and report the Engagement Level Metric we chose to estimate child engagement throughout interactions “in-the-wild.” Overall, our platform offers a feasible system that can engage with children while also allowing us to monitor their engagement and behaviour throughout each interaction.

Child-robot interaction (CRI) has been mostly studied in labs and classroom settings. In this work, we share a CRI language processing study carried out in children’s homes. Any automated system deployed “in-the-wild” faces practical problems, but when the target users are children, these problems get even more sensitive and challenging. In this work we analyse how each language processing layer performs with children at home with no researcher present. We carried out an experiment with 7 families [N=14 children, 6-13 years old] cohabiting with a simulated robot for 2 weeks in their own homes. Our goal in this study is to evaluate the performance of voice recognition, language understanding and dialogue management when children interact with a robot at home. Our results indicate that dialogue management capabilities are becoming the key element in the language processing pipeline; they also denote that the dialogue engine should include mixed-initiative capabilities and show the relative usage of different common built-in intents.

In imagining a future where climate change forces more intimate relationships between humans and nature, social robots can be introduced to revolutionize the way humans understand and communicate with plants. Through the Double Diamond design method with plant owners, we uncovered dif-ferent perspectives of the plant caretaking process and designed a social agent that aids in plant caretaking while fostering a positive human-robot interaction. Then, based on our takeaways from the design process, we crafted a story of an individual who interacts with a future version of our robot who overcomes the language barrier between plants and humans.