Friendly Machines: interaction-oriented robots today and tomorrow

Abstract

Robot engineers have recently built machines whose functions are based on acting jointly with human beings. By participating freely in social life, interaction-oriented robots attract us to establish relationships with them. They may use facial expressions to reproduce aspects of human behaviour (Breazea1 & Scassellati, 1999), or visual and auditory data that mimic aspects of personality (Okuno et al. 2002) They may carry out tasks like guiding people in a museum (Burgard et al. 1998), or use gaze to identify 'intentions' implicit in behaviour (Scassellati, 2000). Below, we report on how an interaction-oriented robot influences schoolchildren who 'get to know' the machine. In descriptionbing Robovie, we spell out why it could be of use in, for example, peer tutoring in a foreign language (Kanda et al. 2004a). In this paper, our main goal is to show how the friendly machine builds relationships and, thus, shows potential for making a positive contribution to society.