Loneliness and isolation among children are pressing matters that can lead to sustainable psychological harm. This work introduces the development of a proof-of-concept of an autonomous social robot to reduce the feeling of loneliness and discomfort in children. A child-friendly pet-like panda design was complemented by modern AI technology to appeal to children and encourage long-term engagement. For this a large language model (LLM) is used to engage in conversations, while emotion recognition and sentiment analysis algorithms identify the child’s emotional state. This information helps the LLM to generate appropriate outputs for the current situation. Furthermore, moving arms and animated eyes were implemented, helping the robot show emotions or engage in games. While no field study has taken place yet, a fully functional prototype, ready for testing, was designed and built. Finally, this report includes a discussion about important topics that need to be taken into consideration in future work.

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