Page 168 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Designing Sociable Machines 151

Low-Level High-Level Perception System
Sensors Feature “People” “Toys”
Extraction Releasers Stimulation
World & Caregiver Attention Behavior System Motivation
Social
Releasers
System
System
Drives
Motor System
Motor Skills Emotion
Motors System
Orient Face Expr Vocal
Head & &Body Acts
Eyes Postures
Figure 18.1. Kismet (left) has 15 degrees of freedom (DoF) in its face, 3 for the eyes, and 3
for the neck. It has 4 cameras, one behind each eyeball, one between the eyes, and one in the
“nose.” It can express itself through facial expression, body posture, gaze direction, and vocal-
izations. The robot’s architecture (right) implements perception, attention, behavior arbitration,
motivation (drives and emotive responses) and motor acts (expressive and skill oriented).

sistencies to learn the significance his actions and expressions have for other
people so that he does share the same meanings. This is the sort of scenario
that we are exploring with Kismet. Hence, it is important that humans treat
and respond to Kismet in a similar manner, and Kismet has been designed to
encourage this.

Regulation of Interactions. As with young infants, Kismet must be well-
versed in regulating its interactions with the caregiver to avoid becoming over-
whelmed or under-stimulated. Inspired by developmental psychology, Kismet
has several mechanisms for accomplishing this, each for different kinds of in-
teractions. They all serve to slow the human down to an interaction rate that
is within the comfortable limits of Kismet’s perceptual, mechanical, and be-
havioral limitations. Further, Kismet provides readable cues as to what the
appropriate level of interaction is. The robot exhibits interest in its surround-
ings and in the humans that engage it, and behaves in a way to bring itself
closer to desirable aspects and to shield itself from undesirable aspects. By
doing so, Kismet behaves to promote an environment for which its capabilities
are well-matched—ideally, an environment where it is slightly challenged but
largely competent—in order to foster its social development.
We have found two distinct regulatory systems to be effective in helping
Kismet to maintain itself in a state of “well-being.” These are the emotive re-
sponses and the homeostatic regulatory mechanisms. The drive processes es-
tablish the desired stimulus and motivate the robot to seek it out and to engage
it. The emotions are another set of mechanisms (see Table 18.1), with greater
direct control over behavior and expression, that serve to bring the robot closer
to desirable situations (“joy,” “interest,” even “sorrow”), and cause the robot to
withdraw from or remove undesirable situations (“fear,” “anger,” or “disgust”).