Page 174 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 19

INFANOID

A Babybot that Explores the Social Environment

Hideki Kozima
Communications Research Laboratory

Abstract We are building an infant-like robot, Infanoid, to investigate the underlying
mechanisms of social intelligence that will allow it to communicate with human
beings and participate in human social activities. We propose an ontogenetic
model of social intelligence, which is being implemented in Infanoid:how the
robot acquires communicative behavior through interaction with the social en-
vironment, especially with human caregivers. The model has three stages: (1)
the acquisition of intentionality, which enables the robot to make use of certain
methods for obtaining goals, (2) identification with others, which enables it to
indirectly experience others’ behavior, and (3) social communication,in which
the robot understands others’ behavior by ascribing it the intention that best ex-
plains the behavior.

1. Introduction
Imagine a robot that can understand and produce a complete repertoire of
human communicative behavior, such as gestures and language. However,
when this robot encounters novel behavior, it fails to understand it. Or, if
the robot encounters a novel situation where any behavior in its repertoire does
not work at all, it gets stuck. As long as the robot is preprogrammed accord-
ing to a blueprint, it is best to take a design stance, instead of a intentional
stance, in trying to understand its behavior [5]. For instance, it would be diffi-
cult to engage the robot in an intentional activity of speech acts, e.g., making
a promise.
Now imagine a robot that has learned and is still learning human commu-
nicative behavior. Because the robot’s intelligence has no blueprint and its
repertoire is incomplete and open to extensions and modifications, taking a de-
sign stance is no longer necessary. To some degree, the robot would be able to