Page 249 - Designing Sociable Robots

breazeal-79017 book March 18, 2002 14:24

230 Chapter 13

psychology, social development, ethology, and evolutionary perspectives are incorporated
into the design of the synthetic nervous system. I highlighted how each system addresses
important issues to support natural and intuitive communication with a human and how
special attention was paid to designing the infrastructure into the synthetic nervous system
to support socially situated learning.
These diverse capabilities are integrated into a single robot situated within a social envi-
ronment. The performance of the human-robot system with numerous studies with human
subjects has been evaluated (Breazeal, 2002). Below I summarize the findings as they pertain
to the key design issues and evaluation criteria outlined in chapter 4.

13.1 Summary of Key Design Issues

Through these studies with human subjects, I have found that Kismet addresses the key
design issues in rich and interesting ways. By going through each design issue, I recap the
different ways in which Kismet meets the four evaluation criteria. Recall from chapter 4,
these criteria are:

• Do people intuitively read and naturally respond to Kismet’s social cues?
Can Kismet perceive and appropriately respond to these naturally offered cues?
•
Does the human adapt to the robot, and the robot adapt to the human, in a way that benefits
•
the interaction?
• Does Kismet readily elicit scaffolding interactions from the human that could be used to
benefit learning?
Real-time performance Kismet successfully maintains interactive rates in all of its sys-
tems to dynamically engage a human. I discussed the performance latencies of several
systems including visual and auditory perception, visual attention, lip synchronization, and
turn-taking behavior during proto-dialogue. Although each of these systems does not per-
form at adult human rates, they operate fast enough to allow a human engage the robot
comfortably. The robot provides important expressive feedback to the human that they
intuitively use to entrain to the robot’s level of performance.
Establishment of appropriate social expectations Great care has been taken in design-
ing Kismet’s physical appearance, its sensory apparatus, its mechanical specification, and
its observable behavior (motor acts and vocal acts) to establish a robot-human relationship
that follows the infant-caregiver metaphor. Following the baby-scheme of Eibl-Eiblsfeldt,
Kismet’s appearance encourages people to treat it as if it were a very young child or infant.
Kismet has been given a child-like voice and it babbles in its own characteristic manner.