Social Robotics for Safer School Routes: An Exploratory Study With a Humanoid Robot and Children

Social robots have the potential to support road safety by enabling intuitive interaction between automated vehicles and human road users in heterogeneous traffic environments. In the context of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS), current solutions primarily address communication between technical actors, while human participants – especially vulnerable groups such as children – remain insufficiently integrated. To address this gap, we investigate the concept of social humanoid robots acting as traffic moderators.
This paper presents an exploratory real-world study in which a humanoid robot interacts with primary and lower-secondary school children in a controlled outdoor traffic playground. Eighty-four students encountered the robot acting as a traffic officer, and their perceptions were captured through open-ended questionnaire feedback. Based on this data, we develop a semantic annotation framework and derive four socio-technical dimensions that characterize how children perceive such systems.

The results show that children integrate technical performance, communicative clarity and social cues when forming judgments about the robot. ... mehrFurthermore, teleoperated robots are interpreted not only through their actions but also through the visible presence of authority figures, which shapes children’s trust and perception of autonomy. These findings provide initial design implications for future traffic-enforcement robots, including the need for reliable perception, intelligible multimodal communication, familiar traffic-officer cues and adaptive autonomy that remains transparent and interpretable.