Sociable Machines: Expressive Social Exchange between Humans and Robots

摘要

Sociable humanoid robots are natural and intuitive for people to communicate with and to teach. The author presents recent advances in building an autonomous humanoid robot, named 'Kismet,' that can engage humans in expressive social interaction. She outlines a set of design issues and a framework that she has found to be of particular importance for sociable robots. Having a human-in-the-loop places significant social constraints on how the robot aesthetically appears, how its sensors are configured, its quality of movement, and its behavior. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolutionary perspectives, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a human caregiver, reminiscent of parent- infant exchanges. Kismet perceives a variety of natural social cues from visual and auditory channels, and delivers social signals to people through gaze direction, facial expressions, body posture, and vocalizations. The author presents the implementation of Kismet's social competencies and evaluates each with respect to the following: (1) the ability of naive subjects to read and interpret the robot's social cues; (2) the robot's ability to perceive and appropriately respond to naturally offered social cues; (3) the robot's ability to elicit interaction scenarios that afford rich learning potential; and (4) how this produces a rich, flexible, dynamic interaction that is physical, affective, and social. Numerous studies with naive human subjects are described that provide the data upon which the author bases her evaluations.