Page 79 - Designing Sociable Robots

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60 Chapter 5

• Time-stamped pitch tracking
• Time-stamped energy tracking
• Time-stamped phonemes

5.4 Summary

Kismet is an expressive robotic creature with perceptual and motor modalities tailored to
natural human communication channels. To facilitate a natural infant-caretaker interaction,
the robot is equipped with visual, auditory, and proprioceptive sensory inputs. Its motor
modalities consist of a high-performance six DoF active vision head supplemented with ex-
pressive facial features. Its hardware and software control architectures have been designed
to meet the challenge of real-time processing of visual signals (approaching 30 Hz) and
auditory signals (frame windows of 10 ms) with minimal latencies (<500 ms). These fifteen
networked computers run the robot’s synthetic nervous system that integrates perception,
attention, motivations, behaviors, and motor acts.
Kismet’s perceptual system is designed to support a variety of important functions. Many
aspects address behavioral and protective responses that evolution has endowed to living
creatures so that they may behave and survive in the physical world. Given the perceptual
richness and complexity of the physical world, I have implemented specific systems to
explicitly organize this flood of information. By doing so, the robot can organize its behavior
around a locus of attention.
The robot’s perceptual abilities have been explicitly tailored to support social interaction
with people and to support social learning/instruction processes. The robot must share
enough of a perceptual world with humans so that communication can take place. The
robot must be able to perceive the social cues that people naturally and intuitively use to
communicate with it. The robot and a human should share enough commonality in those
features of the perceptual world that are of particular interest, so that both are drawn to
attend to similar events and stimuli. Meeting these criteria enables a human to naturally
and intuitively direct the robot’s attention to interesting things in order to establish shared
reference. It also allows a human to communicate affective assessments to the robot, which
could make social referencing possible. Ultimately these abilities will play an important role
in the robot’s social development, as they do for the social development of human infants.