Robots on stage: A cognitive framework for socially interacting robots

Abstract This article is an attempt to characterize the cognitive skills involved in the development of socially interacting robots. We argue that performative arts, such as oral improvised poetry, can serve as a useful testbed for the development and evaluation of robots that interact with humans. The paper presents a speech-based humanoid poet-performer that can (1) listen to human commands and generate poems on demand; (2) perceive audience’s feedback and react displaying the corresponding emotional response; and (3) generate natural gesticulation movements enriched with social signals depending on sentiment processing. We discuss each of the involved abilities, present working implementations and show how they are combined in an embodied cognitive architecture to achieve the fluent coordination and joint-action timing needed in live events.

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