Page 182 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 20

PLAY, DREAMS AND IMITATION IN ROBOTA

Aude Billard
Computer Science Department, University of Southern California

Abstract Imitation, play and dreams are as many means for the child to develop her/his
understanding of the world and of its social rules. What if we were to have a
robot we could play with? What if we could through play and daily interactions,
as we do with our children, be a model for it and teach it (what?) to be human-
like? This chapter describes the Robota dolls, a family of small humanoid robots,
which can interact with the user in many ways, imitating gestures, learning how
to dance and learning how to speak.

1. Introduction
The title of this chapter is a wink to Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his
book Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood [16]. For Piaget, imitation, play
and dreams are as many means for the child to develop her/his understanding
of the world and of its social rules. This chapter discusses the aspects of these
behaviors which make them relevant to research on socially intelligent agents
(SIA)[7].
Natural human-like interaction, such as imitation, speech and gestures are
important means for developing likeable, socially interactive robots.This
chapter describes the Robota dolls, a family of small humanoid robots. The
Robota dolls can interact with the user in many ways, imitating gestures and
learning from her/his teachings. The robots can be taught a simple language,
little melodies and dance steps.

1.1 Play

Entertainment robotics (ER) is one of the many fields which will benefit
from the development of socially intelligent agents. ER aims at creating play-