Page 186 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Play, Dreams and Imitation in Robota 169

Figure 20.2. Left: The teacher guides the motions of Robota using a pair of glasses holding
a pair of IR emitter. The glasses radiation which can be picked up by the robot’s “earrings” IR
receptors. Right: Robotina, the latino version of Robota mirrors the movements of an instructor
by tracking the optical flow created by the two arms moving in front of the camera located on
the left side of the robot.

babble to attract attention. In response to the care-giver’s behavior the “mood”
of the robot varies, becoming less hungry when fed, less tired when rocked and
less sad when gently touched.

Learning behavior. The robot is endowed with learning capacities pro-
vided by an artificial neural network [4], which has general properties for
learning complex time series. The algorithm runs both on the PC interface
and on-board of the robot. When using the PC speech interface, the user can
teach the robot a simple language. The robot is taught by using complete sen-
tences (“You move your leg”, “I touch your arm”, “You are a robot”). After
several teachings, the robot learns the meaning of each word by extracting the
invariant use of the same string in the sentences. It can learn verbs (‘move’,
‘touch’), adjectives (‘left’, ‘right’) and nouns (‘foot’, ‘head’). In addition, the
robot learns some basic syntactic rules by extracting the precedence of words
in the sentence (e.g. the verb “move” comes always before the associated noun
“legs”). Once the language is learned, the robot responds to the user, by speak-
ing new combinations of words for describing its motions and perceptions.
The learning algorithm running on-board of the robot allows learning of
melodies and of simple word combinations (using the keyboard) and learning
of dance movement (using the imitation game) by association of movements
with melodies.

3. Dreams
To conclude this chapter, I wish to share with you my dreams for Robota
and my joy in seeing some of those being now realized.