Adaptive behavior

Adaptive Behavior
http://adb.sagepub.com/ Infant-like Social Interactions between a Robot and a Human Caregiver
Cynthia Breazeal and Brian Scassellati Adaptive Behavior 2000 8: 49 DOI: 10.1177/105971230000800104 The online version of this article can be found at: http://adb.sagepub.com/content/8/1/49

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Infant-like Social Interactions between Robot and a Human Caregiver.

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CYNTHIA BREAZEAL AND BRIAN SCASSELLATI Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab
From birth, human infants are immersed in a social environment that allows them to learn by leveraging the skills and capabilities of their caregivers. A criticalpre-cursor to this type of social learning is the ability to maintain interaction levels that are neither overwhelming nor under-stimulating. In this paper, we present a mechanism for an autonomous robot to regulate the intensity of its social interactions with a human. Similar to the feedback from infant to caregiver, the robot uses expressive displays to modulate the interaction intensity. This mechanismis integrated within a general framework that combines perception, attention, drives, emotions, behavior selection, and motor acts. We present a specific implementation of this architecture that enables

the robot to react appropriately to both social stimuli (faces) and non-social stimuli (moving toys) while maintaining a suitable interaction intensity. We present results from bothface-to-face interactions and interactions mediated through a toy.
Note: This paper was submitted in June, 1998.
1 INTRODUCTION

Social robotics has generally concentrated on the behavior of groups of robots performing behaviors such as flocking, foraging or dispersion (Balch & Arkin, 1994; Mataric, 1995) or on paired robot-robot interactions (Billard & Dautenhahn, 1997). Our work focuses not onrobot-robot interactions, but rather on the construction of robots that engage in meaningful social exchanges with humans. By doing so, it is possible to have a socially sophisticated human assist the robot in acquiring more complex communication skills and in learning the meaning these acts have for others. The interactions with the caregiver can bootstrap the robot’s capabilities. By leveraging theskills and abilities of a benevolent caregiver, it is possible to alleviate many of the normal difficulties of robot learning, such as sparse reinforcement, unconstrained task complexity, and unstructured environments.

having the caregiver satisfy the infant’s drives (Halliday, 1975). The infant’s emotional responses provide important cues which the caregiver uses to
satiate the infant’s drives,and how to carefully regulate the complexity of the interaction. The former is critical for the infant to learn how its actions influence the caregiver, and the later is critical
assess

how

to

for

establishing

and

maintaining

a

suitable

learning

environment for the infant. A critical pre-cursor to this type of social learning is the ability to maintain interactionlevels that are neither overwhelming nor under-stimulating. In this
we present a mechanism for an autonomous robot to regulate the intensity of its social interactions with a human. This mechanism is the first stage of a long-term endeavor to enable social learning between the robot and a human caregiver and is integrated within a general framework that combines perception, attention, drives,...