Page 190 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 21

EXPERIENCES WITH SPARKY, A SOCIAL ROBOT

Mark Scheeff, John Pinto, Kris Rahardja, Scott Snibbe and Robert Tow
All formerly of Interval Research Corporation ∗

Abstract In an effort to explore human response to a socially competent embodied agent,
we have a built a life-like teleoperated robot. Our robot uses motion, gesture and
sound to be social with people in its immediate vicinity. We explored human-
robot interaction in both private and public settings. Our users enjoyed interact-
ing with Sparky and treated it as a living thing. Children showed more engage-
ment than adults, though both groups touched, mimicked and spoke to the robot
and often wondered openly about its intentions and capabilities. Evidence from
our experiences with a teleoperated robot showed a need for next-generation au-
tonomous social robots to develop more sophisticated sensory modalities that
are better able to pay attention to people.

1. Introduction

Much work has been done on trying to construct intelligent robots but little
of that work has focused on how human beings respond to these creatures. This
is partly because traditional artificial intelligence, when applied to robotics, has
often focused on tasks that would be dangerous for humans (mine clearing,
nuclear power, etc.). Even in the case of tasks in which humans are present,
people are mostly seen as obstacles to be avoided. But what if we conceive of
a class of robots that are explicitly social with humans, that treat humans not
as obstacles, but as their focus? There are at least two sides to this problem
that need studying: first, how do you construct a socially competent robot and,
second, how do people respond to it. Our work has focused on studying the
latter question, human response to a socially competent robot.
To that end, we have constructed a robot, Sparky, whose purpose is to be
social with humans in its vicinity. Since we are studying human response,
we have not tried to solve the problem of generating reasonable autonomous