Page 31 - Designing Sociable Robots

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12 Chapter 1

social. Much of this book is concerned with supplying the infrastructure to support socially
situated learning between a robot infant and its human caregiver. Hence, I take care in each
chapter to emphasize the constraints that interacting with a human imposes on the design
of each system, and tie these issues back to supporting socially situated learning.
The chapters are written to be self-contained, each describing a different aspect of
Kismet’s design. It should be noted, however, that there is no central control. Instead,
Kismet’s coherent behavior and its personality emerge from all these systems acting in con-
cert. The interaction between these systems is as important as the design of each individual
system.
Evaluation studies with naive subjects are presented in many of the chapters to socially
ground Kismet’s behavior in interacting with people. Using the data from these studies, I
evaluate the work with respect to the performance of the human-robot system as a whole.

• Chapter 2 I motivate the realization of sociable robots and situate this work with Kismet
with respect to other research efforts. I provide an in-depth discussion of socially situated
learning for humanoid robots to motivate Kismet’s design.
• Chapter 3 I highlight some key insights from developmental psychology. These concepts
have had a profound impact on the types of capabilities and interactions I have tried to
achieve with Kismet.
Chapter 4 I present an overview of the key design issues for sociable robots, an overview
•
of Kismet’s system architecture, and a set of evaluation criteria.
• Chapter 5 I describe the system hardware including the physical robot, its sensory con-
figuration, and the computational platform. I also give an overview of Kismet’s low-level
visual and auditory perceptions. A detailed presentation of the visual and auditory systems
follows in later chapters.

• Chapter 6 I offer a detailed presentation of Kismet’s visual attention system.
• Chapter 7 I present an in-depth description of Kismet’s ability to recognize affective
intent from the human caregiver’s voice.
• Chapter 8 I give a detailed presentation of Kismet’s motivation system, consisting of both
homeostatic regulatory mechanisms as well as models of emotive responses. This system
serves to motivate Kismet’s behavior to maintain Kismet’s internal state of “well-being.”

• Chapter 9 Kismet has several time-varying motivations and a broad repertoire of behav-
ioralstrategiestosatiatethem.ThischapterpresentsKismet’sbehaviorsystemthatarbitrates
among these competing behaviors to establish the current goal of the robot. Given the goal
of the robot, the motor systems are responsible for controlling Kismet’s output modalities
(body, face, and voice) to carry out the task. This chapter also presents an overview of