Page 183 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

166 Socially Intelligent Agents

ful autonomous creatures, which show believable animal-like behaviors [5].
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Successful examples of such intelligent toys are, e.g., the Tamagotchi ,the
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Furbys and the Sony Aibo [12].
For psychologists (starting with Piaget), children’s games are as much an
educational tool as an entertainment device. Similarly, beyond the goal of
making a successful toy, ER aims also at developing entertaining educational
tools [8, 11]. An educational toy offers a challenge. It is such that, through
play, the child explores new strategies and learns new means of using the toy.
While this can be true of the simplest toy, such as a wooden stick (which can
be used as a litt, a drill, a bridge), robotics faces the challenge to create a toy
which is sophisticated while leaving sufficient freedom for the child imagina-
tion. This is made possible in two ways:

1) By making the robot’s behavior (software) adaptable; the user takes part
into the development of its creature (e.g. Tamagotchi, the video game
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Creatures [13], the baby dolls My Real Baby and My Dream Baby ;
the robot becomes more of a pet.
2) By offering flexibility in the design of the robot’s body, e.g. LEGO
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mindstorms .
The Robota dolls have been created in this spirit. They have general learning
abilities which allow the user to teach them a verbal and body (movement)
language. Because they are dolls, the features of their humanoid body can be
changed by the user (choice of skin color, gender, clothing).

1.2 Imitation

Following Piaget, a number of authors pointed out the frequent co-occurrence
of imitation game during play, suggesting that “the context of play offers a
special state of mind (relaxed and free from any immediate need) for imitative
behavior to emerge” [15]. Imitation is a powerful means of social learning,
which offers a wide variety of interaction. One can imitate gestures, postures,
facial expressions, behaviors, where each of the above relates to a different
social context. An interesting aspect of imitation in humans (perhaps as op-
posed to other animals) is that it is a bidirectional process [15]. Humans are
capable to recognize that they are imitated. Imitation becomes also a means of
teaching, where the demonstrator guides the imitator’s reproduction.
Roboticists use imitative learning as a user-friendly means to teach a robot
complex skills, such as learning the best path between two points [4, 6, 9],
learning how to manipulate objects [14, 18], and, more generally, learning
how to perform smooth, human-like movements by a humanoid robot [10, 17].
These efforts seek to enhance the robot’s ability to interact with humans by
providing it with natural, socially driven behaviors [7].