Page 175 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

158 Socially Intelligent Agents

understand and influence our mental states, like desires and beliefs; it would
thus be able to predict and control our behavior, as well as to be predicted and
controlled by us, to some degree. We would regard this robot as a social being,
with whom we would cooperate and compete in our social activities.
The discussion above suggests that social intelligence should have an on-
togenetic history that is open to further development and that the ontogeny
should be similar to that of human interlocutors in a cultural and linguistic
community [10]. Therefore, we are “bringing up” a robot in a physical and so-
cial environment equivalent to that experienced by a human infant. Section 2
introduces our infant robot, Infanoid, as an embodiment of a human infant with
functionally similar innate constraints. Sections 3 to 5 describe how the robot
acquires human communicative behavior through its interaction with human
caregivers. The robot first acquires intentionality, then identifies with others
mainly by means of joint attention, and finally understands the communicative
intentions of others’ behavior.

2. Infanoid, the Babybot
We begin with the premise that any socially communicative intelligence
must have a naturalistic embodiment, i.e. a robot that is structurally and func-
tionally similar to human sensori-motor systems. The robot interacts with its
environment in the same way as humans do, implicitly sharing its experience
with human interlocutors, and gets situated in the environment shared with
humans [10].

Figure 19.1. Infanoid, an upper torso humanoid (left), and its head (right).

Our robot, Infanoid, shown in Figure 19.1 (left), is being constructed as a
possible naturalistic embodiment for communicative development. Infanoid
possesses approximately the same kinematic structure of the upper body of a
three-year-old human infant. Currently, 25 degrees of freedom (DOFs) — 7 in
the head, 3 in the neck, 6 in each arm (excluding the hand), and 3 in the trunk