The purpose of this paper is to construct a methodology for smooth communications between humans and robots. Here, focus is on a mindreading mechanism, which is indispensable in human-human communications. We propose a model of utterance understanding based on this mech-anism. Concretely speaking, we apply the model of a mindreading system (Baron-Cohen 1996) to a model of human-robot communications. More-over, we implement a robot interface system that applies our proposed model. Psychological exper-applies our proposed model. Psychological exper-iments were carried out to explore the validity of the following hypothesis: by reading a robot's mind, a human can estimate the robot's intention with ease, and, moreover, the person can even un-derstand the robot's unclear utterances made by synthesized speech sounds. The results of the ex-periments statistically supported our hypothesis.
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