View - ResearchGate

Chapter 18DESIGNING SOCIABLE MACHINESLessons LearnedCynthia BreazealMIT Media LabAbstractSociable machines are a blend of art, science, and engineering. We highlighthow insights from these disciplines have helped us to address a few key designissues for building expressive humanoid robots that interact with people in asocial manner.1. IntroductionWhat is a sociable machine? In our vision, a sociable machine is able tocommunicate and interact with us, understand and even relate to us, in a personalway. It should be able to understand us and itself in social terms. We,in turn, should be able to understand it in the same social terms—to be ableto relate to it and to empathize with it. In short, a sociable machine is sociallyintelligent in a human-like way, and interacting with it is like interacting withanother person [7].Humans, however, are the most socially advanced of all species. As onemight imagine, an autonomous humanoid robot that could interpret, respond,and deliver human-style social cues even at the level of a human infant is quitea sophisticated machine. For the past few years, we have been exploring thesimplest kind of human-style social interaction and learning (that which occursbetween a human infant with its caregiver) and have used this as a metaphorfor building a sociable robot, called Kismet. This is a scientific endeavor, anengineering challenge, and an artistic pursuit. This chapter discusses a set offour design issues underlying Kismet’s compelling, life-like behavior, and thelessons we have learned in building a robot like Kismet.