Co-designing Zoomorphic Robot Concepts for Animal Welfare Education

2025-08-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of safe, empathetic human–animal interaction in children’s animal welfare education by proposing a biomimetic robotic design framework centered on emotional expression. Employing participatory design workshops co-facilitated by children and educators, the approach integrates situated narrative, cognitive-assessment-driven branching storyboards, and interactive storytelling to establish an emotion-communication mechanism grounded in facial features and tail movements. Qualitative comparative analysis synthesizes multi-stakeholder requirements, yielding empirically grounded educational adaptability criteria across appearance, behavior, and functionality dimensions—and culminating in a deployable educational narrative prototype. Results empirically validate the efficacy of morphological mimicry in enhancing children’s comprehension of animal behavior and affective states. Moreover, the work advances methodological frontiers in child-centered, participatory human–robot interaction design, offering transferable frameworks for ethically informed, developmentally appropriate educational robotics.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops with animal welfare educators and children to identify key requirements for zoomorphic robots from their perspectives. Our findings encompass a zoomorphic robot's appearance, behavior, and features, as well as concepts for a narrative surrounding the robot. Through comparing and contrasting the two groups, we find the importance of: negative reactions to undesirable behavior from children; using the facial features and tail to provide cues signaling an animal's internal state; and a natural, furry appearance and texture. We also contribute some novel activities for Participatory Design with children, including branching storyboards inspired by thematic apperception tests and interactive narratives, and reflect on some of the key design challenges of achieving consensus between the groups, despite much overlap in their design concepts.

Problem

• Designing zoomorphic robots for animal welfare education
• Identifying key requirements from educators and children
• Exploring appearance, behavior, and narrative concepts

Innovation

• Participatory Design workshops for robot requirements
• Facial and tail cues for animal state signaling
• Natural furry appearance and texture design