Page 191 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

174 Socially Intelligent Agents

action. Rather, we have built a teleoperated device, and manifested a degree of
social intelligence which we believe could be accomplished autonomously in
the near, though not present, future.
Our studies were a broad ranging exploration that asked open-ended ques-
tions. Would people find Sparky compelling or disturbing? What behaviors
would people exhibit around the robot? What new skills does a robot need to
develop when it is in a social setting (and what skills can it forget)? We hope
that our findings can help to guide the development of future robots that ei-
ther must or would like to be social with humans. We also hope that our work
points to the potential for interface devices that use a physical system (a body)
as a way to communicate with users.

2. Prior Work

In searching for inspiration in creating life-like characters, we first looked
towards the principles of traditional animation and cartooning [13, 5]. The
computer graphics community has also explored many ways of creating realis-
tic, screen-based, animated characters [1, 11]. We ended up using Ken Perlin’s
Improv system [7] as the foundation for our approach to movement.
Masahiro Mori has written eloquently on the perils of building a robot that
resembles a living creature too much. His point, that cartoons or simplified rep-
resentations of characters are generally more acceptable to people than com-
plicated “realistic” representations, became an important tool in making our
design decisions (adapted from [9]).
The emerging field of affective computing also provided motivation and jus-
tification for our work [8]. In an example of this type of endeavor, Breazeal
[3, 2] has built an animated head, called Kismet, that can sense human affect
through vision and sound and express itself with emotional posturing. Dar-
win’s timeless work [4] inspired us to use a face on our robot.
Lastly, Isbister [6] has written an excellent discussion on the difference be-
tween traditional notions of intelligence, which emphasize the construction
of an accurate “brain”, and the idea of perceived intelligence, which empha-
sizes the perceptions of those who experience these artificial brains. This work
helped us to understand how users saw intelligence in unfamiliar people or
devices.

3. Our Robot, Sparky

Sparky is about 60cm long, 50cm high and 35cm wide (Figure 21.1). It has
an expressive face, a movable head on a long neck, a set of moving plates on its
back and wheels for translating around the room. A remote operator manifests
the personality we have constructed for Sparky in a manner similar to giving
directions to an actor on a stage: some movements are set explicitly and then