Hey Great! Kind of! 
So if leaving them as Pawn works, you don’t need that custom channel and you can remove it.
Then you tell the player to ignore pawns (it should be a pawn itself). Ensure that both any colliders AND your skeletal mesh says so on BOTH your player and your little guys!
Let me know if that doesn’t work, and let’s leave it unsolved until it’s all ironed out! 
Edit: Also I took a look at your picture- You’ll want to rename that to BP_something because AI names generally are just the brain/controller. What you have in the picture is a character