Social robots, owing to their embodied physical presence in human spaces and the ability to directly interact with the users and their environment, have a great potential to support children in various activities in education, healthcare and daily life. Child-Robot Interaction (CRI), as any domain involving children, inevitably faces the major challenge of designing generalized strategies to work with unique, turbulent and very diverse individuals. Addressing this challenging endeavor requires to combine the standpoint of the robot-centered perspective, i.e. what robots technically can and are best positioned to do, with that of the child-centered perspective, i.e. what children may gain from the robot and how the robot should act to best support them in reaching the goals of the interaction. This article aims to help researchers bridge the two perspectives and proposes to address the development of CRI scenarios with insights from child psychology and child development theories. To that end, we review the outcomes of the CRI studies, outline common trends and challenges, and identify two key factors from child psychology that impact child-robot interactions, especially in a long-term perspective: developmental stage and individual characteristics. For both of them we discuss prospective experiment designs which support building naturally engaging and sustainable interactions.

翻译：社交机器人凭借其在人类空间中的实体存在以及与用户及环境直接交互的能力，在支持儿童开展教育、医疗健康和日常生活等各类活动方面具有巨大潜力。儿童与机器人交互（Child-Robot Interaction, CRI）作为涉及儿童的任何领域，不可避免地面临设计通用策略以应对独特、多变且高度异质性个体这一重大挑战。应对这一艰巨挑战需要融合以机器人为中心的视角（即机器人技术能力边界与最佳应用场景）与以儿童为中心的视角（即儿童可能从机器人中获得的收益，以及机器人应如何行动以最佳支持其达成交互目标）。本文旨在帮助研究者弥合这两种视角，并提出借鉴儿童心理学与儿童发展理论的研究洞见来构建儿童与机器人交互场景的方法。为此，我们综述了儿童与机器人交互研究的结果，归纳了共性趋势与挑战，并从儿童心理学中识别出影响儿童与机器人交互的两个关键因素（尤其在长期交互视角下）：发展阶段与个体特征。针对这两个因素，我们探讨了支持构建自然引人且可持续交互的前瞻性实验设计。