Page 55 - Designing Sociable Robots

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36 Chapter 3

that he gains further information and more and more models of motor skills, of communi-
cation, and eventually of language. By the time his representational and phonemic systems
are ready to begin learning language, he is already able to make his intentions understood
most of the time, to orient himself in order to read and interpret other’s responses, to elicit
repetitions and variations.”

3.4 Proto-Social Responses for Kismet

Our goal is for people to interact, play, and teach Kismet as naturally as they would an infant
or very young child. These interactions provide many different kinds of scaffolding that
Kismet could potentially use to foster its own learning. As a prerequisite for these interac-
tions, people need to ascribe precocious social intelligence to Kismet, much as caregivers
do for their infants. In doing so, people will treat Kismet as a socially aware creature and
provide those interactions that Kismet will need to learn to become socially sophisticated.
For people to treat Kismet as a socially aware being, it needs to convey subjective internal
states: intents, beliefs, desires, and feelings. The robot can be designed to exploit our
natural human tendencies to respond socially to certain behaviors. To accomplish this, my
colleagues and I have implemented several infant-like social cues and responses that human
infants exhibit.
Acts that make subjective processes overt include focusing attention on objects, orienting
to external events, handling or exploring objects with interest, and so forth. Summarizing
the discussions of this chapter, I divide these responses into four categories. These are listed
below. By implementing these four classes of responses (affective, exploratory, protective,
and regulatory), I aim to encourage a person to treat Kismet as a social creature and to
establish meaningful communication with it.

• Affective responses allow the human to attribute feelings to the robot.
• Exploratory responses allow the human to attribute curiosity, interest, and desires to the
robot, and can be used to direct the interaction toward objects and events in the world.
Protective responses keep the robot away from damaging stimuli and elicit concerned and
•
caring responses from the human.
• Regulatory responses maintain a suitable environment that is neither too overwhelming
nor under-stimulating, and tunes the human’s behavior in a natural and intuitive way to the
competency of the robot.

Of course, once Kismet can partake in social interactions with people, it is also important
that the dynamics of the interaction be natural and intuitive. For this, I take the work of