Robots as educational toys

The Robota project at EPFL is about using ROBOTA dolls, a family of mini humanoid robots, as educational toys. The dolls can engage in complex interaction with humans, involving speech, vision and body imitation. They have been used for instance in projects related with kids and autism (as I mentioned here) There are some intriguing videos, especially the ones about language acquisition (16.5 Mb) or imitation of user's gestures (5.8 Mb).