RoboRecycle Buddy: Enhancing Early Childhood Green Education and Recycling Habits Through Playful Interaction with a Social Robot

The escalating environmental challenges faced by our world today make it imperative to instill eco-friendly habits and environmental awareness in young children, who will be at the forefront of addressing these issues in the future. In this paper, we present the “RoboRecycle Buddy”, a voice and chat GPT-integrated social robot designed to enhance early childhood green education and foster positive recycling habits through playful interaction. By incorporating engaging, voice feedback-based educational content, the RoboRecycle Buddy aims to make learning about recycling enjoyable, accessible, and relevant to children, while simultaneously sparking their interest in the rapidly growing field of robotics. We discuss the design, development, and implementation of the RoboRecycle Buddy, highlighting its innovative features such as object recognition, face recognition, and natural voice interaction which encourages children to practice responsible waste disposal. The robot leverages advanced voice recognition technology and the GPT language model, enabling it to engage in contextually relevant conversations with children, both through voice and text, further enhancing their learning experience. The robot is equipped with an image recognition module based on a Convolutional Neural Network, enabling it to detect and classify waste materials in a manner similar to a child, i.e., by simply looking at them. We emphasize the importance of providing a supportive learning environment that encourages children to explore, question, and develop a deeper understanding of the recycling process. The paper concludes with a discussion on future research and development directions, including potential improvements and adaptations to the RoboRecycle Buddy, as well as broader implications for the field of Child-Robot Interaction.