Page 24 - Designing Sociable Robots

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The Vision of Sociable Robots 5

1.2 The Robot, Kismet

The goal of this book is to pioneer a path toward the creation of sociable robots. Along
the way, I’ve tried to provide a map of this relatively uncharted area so that others might
follow. Toward this goal, the remainder of this chapter offers several key components of
social intelligence and discusses what these abilities consist of for these machines. Many
of these attributes are derived from several distinguishing characteristics of human social
intelligence. From this, I construct a framework and define a set of design issues for building
socially intelligent robots in the following chapters. Our journey should be a responsible
one, well-conceived and well-intentioned. For this reason, this book also raises some of the
philosophical and ethical questions regarding how building such technologies shapes our
self-understanding, and how these technologies might impact society. This book does not
provide answers but instead hopes to foster discussion that will help us to develop these
sorts of technologies in responsible ways.
Aspects of this potentially could be applied to the design of socially intelligent software
agents. There are significant differences between the physical world of humans and the
virtual world of computer agents, however. These differences impact how people perceive
and interact with these two different types of technology, and vice versa. Perhaps the most
striking difference is the physical and immediately proximate interactions that transpire
between humans and robots that share the same social world. Some issues and constraints
remain distinct for these different technologies. For this reason, I acknowledge relevant
research in the software agents community, but focus my presentation on the efforts in the
robotics domain.
Humans are the most socially advanced of all species. As one might imagine, an au-
tonomous humanoid robot that could interpret, respond, and deliver human-style social
cues even at the level of a human infant is quite a sophisticated machine. Hence, this book
explores the simplest kind of human-style social interaction and learning, that which oc-
curs between a human infant with its caregiver. My primary interest in building this kind
of sociable, infant-like robot is to explore the challenges of building a socially intelligent
machine that can communicate with and learn from people.
This is a scientific endeavor, an engineering challenge, and an artistic pursuit. Starting in
1997, my colleagues and I at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab began to construct such
a robot (see figure 1.4). It is called Kismet, and we have implemented a wide variety of
infant-level social competencies into it by adapting models and theories from the fields
of psychology, cognitive development, and ethology. This book, a revised version of my
doctoral dissertation (Breazeal, 2000c), uses the implementation of Kismet as a case study to
illustrate how this framework is applied, how these design issues are met, how scientific and
artistic insights are incorporated into the design, and how the work is evaluated. It is a very