View - ResearchGate

Designing Sociable Machines 153critical part of the environment, so evoking appropriate behaviors from the humanis essential for this project. Kismet should have an appealing appearanceand a natural interface that encourages humans to interact with Kismet as if itwere a young, socially aware creature. If successful, humans will naturally andunconsciously provide scaffolding interactions. Furthermore, they will expectthe robot to behave at a competency-level of an infant-like creature. This levelshould be commensurate with the robot’s perceptual, mechanical, and computationallimitations.Great care has been taken in designing Kismet’s physical appearance, itssensory apparatus, its mechanical specification, and its observable behavior(motor acts and vocal acts) to establish a robot-human relationship that adheresto the infant-caregiver metaphor. Following the baby-scheme of Eibl-Eiblsfeldt[8], Kismet’s appearance encourages people to treat it as if it were a very youngchild or infant. Kismet has been given a child-like voice and it babbles in itsown characteristic manner.Given Kismet’s youthful appearance, we have found that people use manyof the same behaviors that are characteristic of interacting with infants. As aresult, they present a simplified class of stimuli to the robot’s sensors, whichmakes our perceptual task more manageable without having to explicitly instructpeople in how to engage the robot. For instance, we have found thatpeople intuitively slow down and exaggerate their behavior when playing withKismet, which simplifies the robot’s perceptual task. Female subjects are willingto use exaggerated prosody when talking to Kismet, characteristic of motherese.Both male and female subjects tend to sit directly in front of and closeto Kismet, facing it the majority of the time. When engaging Kismet in protodialogue,they tend to slow down, use shorter phrases, and wait longer forKismet’s response. Some subjects use exaggerated facial expressions.Along a similar vein, the design should minimize factors that could detractfrom a natural infant-caretaker interaction. Ironically, humans are particularlysensitive (in a negative way) to systems that try to imitate humans butinevitably fall short. Humans have strong implicit assumptions regarding thenature of human-like interactions, and they are disturbed when interacting witha system that violates these assumptions [6]. For this reason, we consciouslydecided to not make the robot look human.Readable Social Cues. As with human infants, Kismet should send socialsignals to the human caregiver that provide the human with feedback of its internalstate. This allows the human to better predict what the robot is likelyto do and to shape their responses accordingly. Kismet does this by means ofexpressive behavior. It can communicate emotive state and social cues to ahuman through facial expression, body posture, gaze direction, and voice. Wehave found that the scientific basis for how emotion correlates to facial expres-