Robot's play: interactive games with sociable machines

Personal robots for human entertainment form a new class of computer-based entertainment that is beginning to become commercially and computationally practical. We expect that the principal manifestation of the robots' entertainment capabilities will be socially interactive game playing. We describe this form of gaming and summarize our current efforts in this direction on our lifelike, expressive, autonomous humanoid robot. Our focus is on teaching the robot via playful interaction using natural social gesture and language. We detail this in terms of two broad categories: teaching <i>as</i> play and teaching <i>with</i> play.

[1]  Michael L. Mauldin,et al.  CHATTERBOTS, TINYMUDS, and the Turing Test: Entering the Loebner Prize Competition , 1994, AAAI.

[2]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[3]  Alex Pentland,et al.  The ALIVE system: full-body interaction with autonomous agents , 1995, Proceedings Computer Animation'95.

[4]  M. Carpenter,et al.  Three sources of information in social learning , 2002 .

[5]  C. Breazeal Sociable Machines: Expressive Social Ex-change Between Humans and Robots , 2000 .

[6]  Demetri Terzopoulos,et al.  Artificial fishes: Autonomous locomotion, perception, behavior, and learning in a simulated physical world , 1994 .

[7]  Magdalena D. Bugajska,et al.  Building a Multimodal Human-Robot Interface , 2001, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[8]  D. Premack,et al.  Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? , 1978, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[9]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  Explaining Facial Imitation: A Theoretical Model. , 1997, Early development & parenting.

[10]  Bruce Blumberg,et al.  Integrated learning for interactive synthetic characters , 2002, SIGGRAPH.

[11]  J. Bruner,et al.  The role of tutoring in problem solving. , 1976, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[12]  Aaron F. Bobick,et al.  Fast Lighting Independent Background Subtraction , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[13]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  What imitation tells us about social cognition: a rapprochement between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. , 2003, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[14]  Robert C. Bolles,et al.  Background modeling for segmentation of video-rate stereo sequences , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Cat. No.98CB36231).

[15]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Interactive robot theatre , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[16]  A. Meltzoff Chapter 16 - The Human Infant as Imitative Generalist: A 20-Year Progress Report on Infant Imitation with Implications for Comparative Psychology , 1996 .

[17]  Clifford Nass,et al.  The media equation - how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places , 1996 .

[18]  Jane Heal,et al.  Understanding Other Minds from the Inside , 1998, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement.

[19]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Toward sociable robots , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[20]  Cory D. Kidd,et al.  Sociable robots : the role of presence and task in human-robot interaction , 2003 .

[21]  Rosalind W. Picard,et al.  Automated Posture Analysis for Detecting Learner's Interest Level , 2003, 2003 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop.

[22]  Markus Gross,et al.  Towards a game agent , 2003 .

[23]  Trevor Darrell,et al.  Integrated Person Tracking Using Stereo, Color, and Pattern Detection , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Cat. No.98CB36231).

[24]  Rosalind W. Picard,et al.  Signal processing for recognition of human frustration , 1998, Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP '98 (Cat. No.98CH36181).

[25]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Learning From and About Others: Towards Using Imitation to Bootstrap the Social Understanding of Others by Robots , 2005, Artificial Life.

[26]  R. Gordon Folk Psychology as Simulation , 1986 .