Grounding communication in situated, social robots

Abstract

This paper discusses the usefulness of communication as a social skill for embodied robotic agents. We study a teacher-learner situation in a `meaningful' (hilly) environment. The learner uses the teacher as a model, i.e. learning to communicate means in this case that the learner tries to achieve a similar `interpretation' of the environment as the teacher, on the basis of its own sensory-motor interactions. A simple imitative strategy (following and keeping-contact) is used as the social context in which associative learning takes place. A specific scenario (`mother-child') is proposed and implemented as an example for a situation in which the ability to communicate is advantageous for an individual robot. The communication skill develops during the experiment using a non-supervised teaching approach. Learning to communicate occurs as part of a general architecture for multiple sensory association processes. Communication is not treated as a specialised module, but as an additional s...