A Systematic Review on Reproducibility in Child-Robot Interaction

Although initially emerging in psychology, many of the concerns raised, such as lack of open access to data, materials, and/or experimental design apply also to other (social) sciences. Among these are both Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and its related sub-field of Child Robot Interaction (CRI), where social and psychological relationships between humans and robots are often the focus of the research. Given its novelty and rapidly evolving progress, CRI in particular suffers from fragmented and heterogeneous literature, varying research goals, and a lack of standardised methods and metrics. Recent efforts have brought forth conversations related to replication specifically within CRI [51, 52], with authors appealing for more works that address the main challenges in HRI with children whilst still ensuring high-quality reporting and data sharing. However, clear open science guidelines on reproducibility in HRI and related sub-fields are still missing.