Virtual robot and virtual environments for cognitive skills assessment

Robots with adapted controllers have been used to assess cognitive skills of children with motor impairments who are sometimes difficult to assess with standardized tests that rely on verbal or motor responses. Objective: Develop a virtual robot and virtual scenarios for cognitive skills assessment. Main content: The paper describes the development of a virtual robot and virtual scenarios that mimic the physical robot and activities of a previous study. The goal is to use this virtual robot for comparing children's experiences using both the physical and the virtual robot, as measured by their performance executing the proposed activities. If experiences are equivalent, virtual robots, simulated environments, objects, and activities could be developed and widely shared and utilized without the need for a physical robot. The paper also reports a pilot study of the developed virtual robot involving three typically developing children, aged three, four and five years. Results: Pilot test participants were able to perform the activities according to their cognitive age both with the virtual and with the physical robot, showing that the virtual robot and the virtual environments are close enough to their physical counterparts. Conclusions: The developed system adequately mimics the physical robot and activities of a previous study. With minor adaptations, it will be used in the experimental part of an ongoing research project to assess if children's experiences using the virtual and the physical robots to perform the same activities are equivalent.