Interactive humanoids and androids as ideal interfaces for humans

ABSTRACT

Many robotics researchers are exploring new possibilities of intelligent robots in our everyday life. Humanoid and androids, which have various modalities, can communicate with humans as new information media. In this talk, we argue how to develop the interactive robots and how to evaluate them as introducing several robots developed in ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communications Laboratories and Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, Osaka University. Especially, we focus on a constructive approach to developing the interactive robots, cognitive studies using the humanoids and androids for evaluating the interactions, and long-term field experiments in an elementary school.The talk consists of two parts. There are two relationships between robots and humans: one is inter-personal and the other is social. In the inter-personal relationships, the appearance of the robot is a new and important research issues. In the social relationships, a function to recognize human relationships through interactions is needed for robots of the next generation. These two issues explore new possibilities of robots.In these issues, the appearance problem bridges between science and engineering. In the development of humanoids, both the appearance and behavior of the robots are significant issues. However, designing the robot's appearance, especially to give it a humanoid one, was always a role of the industrial designer. To tackle the problem of appearance and behavior, two approaches are necessary: one from robotics and the other from cognitive science. The approach from robotics tries to build very humanlike robots based on knowledge from cognitive science. The approach from cognitive science uses the robot for verifying hypotheses for understanding humans. We call this cross-interdisciplinary framework android science (www.androidscience.com).The speaker hopes that attendees catch new waves in robotics and media research and our feature life.