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Designing Sociable Robots 49

potential. My colleagues and I have endowed the robot with a substantial amount of infras-
tructure that we believe will enable the robot to leverage from these interactions to foster its
social development. As a result, I evaluate Kismet with respect to interact-ability criteria.
These are inherently subjective, yet quantifiable, measures that evaluate the quality and ease
of interaction between robot and human. They address the behavior of both partners, not
just the performance of the robot. The evaluation criteria for interact-ability are as follows:

• 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? Specifically, is the resulting interaction natural, intuitive, and enjoyable for
the human, and can Kismet perform well despite its perceptual, mechanical, behavioral,
and computational limitations?

• Does Kismet readily elicit scaffolding interactions from the human that could be used to
benefit learning?

4.6 Summary

In this chapter, I have outlined my approach for the design of a robot that can engage
humans in a natural, intuitive, social manner. I have carefully considered a set of design
issues that are of particular importance when interacting with people (Breazeal, 2001b).
Humans will perceive and interpret the robot’s actions as socially significant and possessing
communicative value. They will respond to them accordingly. This defines a very differ-
ent set of constraints and challenges for autonomous robot control that lie along a social
dimension.
I am interested in giving Kismet the ability to enter into social interactions reminiscent of
those that occur between infant and caregiver. These include interactive games, having the
human treat Kismet’s babbles and expressions as though they are meaningful, and to treat
Kismet as a socially aware creature whose behavior is governed by perceived mental states
such as intents, beliefs, desires, and feelings. As discussed in chapter 3, these interactions are
critical for the social development of infants. Continuing with the infant-caregiver metaphor
for Kismet, these interactions could also prove important for Kismet’s social development.
In chapter 2, I outlined several interesting ways in which various forms of scaffolding
address several key challenges of robot learning.
As such, this work is concerned with providing the infrastructure to elicit and support
these future learning scenarios. In this chapter, I outlined a framework for this infrastructure