VOA常速英语:For Autistic Kids, Robots Can Be Social, Learning Study Buddy

Six-year-old Adrian is playing a game with his robot friend, Kiwi.Adrian is on the autism spectrum and Kiwi is no toy. It’s a socially assistive robot.
六岁的艾德里安正在和他的机器人朋友Kiwi玩游戏。艾德里安是自闭症候群中的一员，Kiwi也并不是一个玩具，它是个社交辅助机器人。

You are doing really great, keep up the good work.Social assistant robotics is a new field that we actually founded about 15 years ago.Based on the ability of robots to help people,many children on the autism spectrum can respond positively to robots and in fact can be motivated and learned social skills.
你做得真的很好，继续加油吧。社交辅助机器人是一个新的领域，我们是在大约15年前建立的这一项目。基于机器人帮助人们的能力，自闭症候群中的许多孩子能够对机器人做出积极的反应，事实上，机器人能够激发他们并使其学会社交技能。

With support from the National Science Foundation,roboticist Mayama Tariq and a team are building and programming these unique robots in their lab at the University of Southern California.They even worked with a puppeteer to design its look.It’s part of a first-of-its-kind field study designed to see how children like Adrian would benefit from having a socially assistive robot in the home.So the goal is to really study what happens when the robot is in the home for an extended period of time.Professor Met Eric and her students work closely with educational psychologist Gisele Ragosa.She’s helped develop the game content, recruit families and assess the progress of the children in the program.
在国家科学基金会的支持下，机器人专家玛雅塔里克和其团队在位于南加州大学的实验室里，正努力制造这些独特的机器人并对其进行编程。他们甚至请来了木偶师一起设计机器人的外观。这项研究部分首次实地进行，目的是了解像艾德里安这样的孩子，如果在家里有一个社会辅助机器人帮助他，会给其带来什么样的改善。因此，我们的目标是，研究机器人来到家中很长一段时间后会发生的情况。麦特·埃里克教授和她的学生们与教育心理学家吉赛尔·拉戈萨密切合作。吉赛尔·拉戈萨帮助开发游戏内容，招募家庭成员，并评估项目中孩子们的进步。

The idea behind the whole in-home experience is that we want to bring the intervention in the therapeutic interaction to the child at their level in their environment with the kind of comfort that they have in need at home so that they can select to interact at a time that is best and optimal for their learning and for their social behaviors.Early results are promising.The children’s math skills are improving and the datasets collected by the robots are huge.For every session where the child and the robot are interacting,we’re getting video, audio, we’re getting performance on the game, so there’s so much to analyze.Well I’m having the annotators annotate for eye gaze.
让机器人进入家中的原因是，我们想让孩子们在舒适的家庭环境中进行所需的治疗，这样他们就可以选择在最适合他们学习和进行社交的时候进行互动。初期结果非常乐观。孩子们的数学能力正在提高，机器人收集的数据集也非常庞大。每一次孩子和机器人互动的时候，我们都会采集到到视频、音频以及孩子们的表现，所以有很多东西需要分析。我们让注释师其视线进行标注，

The team document is much as they can, everything from eye gaze to verbal responses.So we’re hoping to collect enough data to where we can train some machine learning algorithms so that our robot could get better over time in adapting to each child.I’m sorry. That’s not the right answer, you will get it next time.
该团队收集到了大量文件资料，从视线到语言反应。我们希望收集足够的数据，然后可以训练一些机器学习算法，这样随着时间的推移，我们的机器人将能够更好地适用于每个孩子。对不起，答案错误，下次加油哦。

In addition to supplementing the interactions a child has with a human therapist,socially assistive robots could help people who are isolated lonely or depressed.They could fill in where people cannot be to help other people. That’s the idea.Not that they’re replacing people, but when there is no one else, someone or something should be there.A friend in need is a friend indeed, whether human or robot.
除了辅助儿童与人类治疗师的互动之外，社交辅助机器人还可以帮助那些孤独或抑郁的人。机器人可以在人们无法从他人身上获取帮助时提供帮助。这就是我们对这个项目的想法。并不是说他们要取代人类，而是当没有其他人在身边的时候，就应该有人或一些东西在那里陪着你，不管是人类还是机器人，患难中的朋友才是真正的朋友。

I’m Faith Lapidus VOA News
美国之音记者Faith Lapidus报道