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. Increasingly socially intelligent agents (software or robotic) are used in education, rehabilitation and therapy. This paper discusses the role of interactive, mobile robots as social mediators in the particular domain of autism therapy. This research is part of the project AURORA that studies how mobile robots can be used to teach children with autism basic interaction skills that are important in social interactions among humans. Results from a particular series of trials involving pairs of two children and a mobile robot are described. The results show that the scenario with pairs of children and a robot creates a very interesting social context which gives rise to a variety of different social and non-social interaction patterns, demonstrating the specific problems but also abilities of children with autism in social interactions. Future work will include a closer analysis of interactional structure in human-human and robot-human interaction. We outline a particular framework that we are investigating. 1

This article puts research on socially intelligent agents (SIA) in the broader context of how humans (and other primates) perceive and interact with the social world. Phylogenetic (evolutionary) and ontogenetic (developmental) issues are discussed with respect to the social origin of primate and human intelligence and human culture. Implications for designing artifacts and for the evolvability of human societies are outlined. A theory of empathy is presented that is based on current research on the primate social brain. Research projects that investigate some of these issues are reviewed. I argue that Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) research, although strongly linked to software and robotic engineering, goes beyond a software engineering paradigm: it can potentially serve as a paradigm for a science of social minds. A systematic and experimental investigation of human social minds and the way humans perceive the social world can result in truly social artifacts,...

The paper discusses dynamics in human-robot interaction. Firstly, we propose a terminology for classifying robot-human interaction dynamics of increasing complexity. Secondly, we address the role of human-robot interaction in a particular application area, namely rehabilitation. Specifically, we discuss the area of autism and how mobile robots can play a therapeutic role in the rehabilitation of children with autism (investigated in the project AURORA). Problems and challenges of this work in progress aiming at `getting the interaction dynamics right' are discussed. 1. Introduction: Building Interactive Robotic Systems In recent years, the concept of believability and believable characters has attracted a lot of attention in the field of autonomous agents ((Bates, 1994), (Dautenhahn, 1998), (Porter and Susman, 2000)). Increasingly, researchers are exploiting techniques which have been originally developed in Arts and animation in order to allow a `suspension of disbelief'....

Abstract — This paper promotes socially intelligent animated agents for the pedagogical task of English conversation training for native speakers of Japanese. Since student-agent conversations are realized as role-playing interactions, strong requirements are imposed on the agents ’ affective and social abilities. As a novel feature, social role awareness is introduced to animated conversational agents, that are by now strong affective reasoners, but otherwise often lack the social competence observed with humans. In particular, humans may easily adjust their behavior depending on their respective role in a social setting, whereas their synthetic pendants tend to be driven mostly by emotions and personality. Our main contribution is the incorporation of a ‘social filter program ’ to mental models of animated agents. This program may qualify an agent’s expression of its emotional state by the social context, thereby enhancing the agent’s believability as a conversational partner. Our implemented system is web-based and demonstrates socially aware animated agents in a virtual coffee shop environment. An experiment with our conversation system shows that users consider socially aware agents as more natural than agents that violate conventional practices.

Emotion is a concept increasingly used in designing autonomous robotic agents, especially for allowing the satisfaction of basic conditions crucial to the robot survival, for responding emotionally to situations experienced in the world and to humans interacting with it. But psychological evidence also suggests that emotion plays an important role in managing social interactions in groups. This document is a position paper explaining why emotion can benefit the eld of distributed autonomous robotic systems. It also outlines research issues that need to be addressed to validate the usefulness of the concept of arti cial emotion in social robotics.

Abstract Turn-taking behavior is simulated in a coupled-agents system. Each agent is modeled as a mobile robot with two wheels. A recurrent neural network is used to produce the motor outputs and to hold the internal dynamics. Agents are developed to take turns on a two-dimensional arena by causing the network structures to evolve. Turn taking is established using either regular or chaotic behavior of the agents. It is found that chaotic turn takers are more sensitive in response to inputs from the other agent. Conversely, regular turn takers are comparatively robust against noisy inputs, owing to their restricted dynamics. From many observations, including turn taking with virtual agents, we claim that there is a complementary relationship between robustness and adaptability. Furthermore, by investigating the recoupling of agents from different GA generations, we

This paper discusses two prominent theories of cognitive development and relates them to experiments in social robotics. The main difference between these theories lies in the different views on the relationship between a child and its social environment: a) the child as a solitary thinker (Piaget) and b) the child in society (Vygotsky). We discuss the implications this has on the design of socially intelligent agents, focusing on robotic agents. We argue that the framework proposed by Vygotsky provides a promising research direction in autonomous agents. We give examples of implementations in the area of social robotics which support our theoretical considerations. More specifically, we demonstrate how a teacher-learner setup can be used to teach a robot a proto-language. The same control architecture is also used for a humanoid doll robot which can interact with a human by imitation. Another experiment addresses dynamic coupling of movements between a human and a mobile robot. Here, ...

We discuss robotic experiments in a framework based on theories in developmental psychology. 1 Introduction Piaget's theory of cognitive development has strongly influenced many approaches in artificial intelligence and agent research. His theory has been challenged from various directions, and recent experiments have confirmed Vygotsky's belief in the essential role of social interaction and teaching as a scaffolding mechanism which is important for the child in order to reach higher levels of competence and control based on current skills. Hereby concepts are not taught directly but through social interaction, the child's experiences are re-arranged, a shared understanding develops between the child and its interaction partner. A Piagetean viewpoint sees language as a product of the cognitive development of mental representations, while Vygotsky believes that the sole primary function of language is communication with peers and adults, and that language develops exactly in this cont...

In this paper we want to propose the idea that some techniques used for animal training might be helpful for solving human robot interaction problems in the context of entertainment robotics. We present a model for teaching complex actions to an animal-like autonomous robot based on "clicker training", a method used efficiently by professional trainers for animals of different species. After describing our implementation of clicker training on an enhanced version of AIBO, Sony's four-legged robot, we argue that this new method can be a promising technique for teaching unusual behavior and sequences of actions to a pet robot.