Embodied Cooperative behavior for a Humanoid Robot that Communicates with Humans

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a humanoid robot that pretends to listen to humans by effectively using its body properties in a route guidance situation. A human teaches a route to the robot, and the developed robot behaves as a human-like listener by utilizing both temporal and spatial cooperative behaviors to demonstrate that it is indeed listening to its human counterpart. The robot consists of many communicative units and rules for selecting appropriate units. A communicative unit realizes a particular cooperative behavior such as eye-contact and nodding, found through previous research. The rules for selecting communicative units were retrieved through WOZ experiments. An experiment was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the developed robot, and, as a result, the robot with cooperative behavior received higher subjective evaluation, which is rather similar to a human listener. The detailed analysis showed that this higher evaluation was due mainly to body movements as well as utterances. On the other hand, subjects' utterance to the robot was promoted by the robot's utterances but not by the body movements.