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Chapter 19INFANOIDA Babybot that Explores the Social EnvironmentHideki KozimaCommunications Research LaboratoryAbstractWe are building an infant-like robot, Infanoid, to investigate the underlyingmechanisms of social intelligence that will allow it to communicate with humanbeings and participate in human social activities. We propose an ontogeneticmodel of social intelligence, which is being implemented in Infanoid: howtherobot acquires communicative behavior through interaction with the social environment,especially with human caregivers. The model has three stages: (1)the acquisition of intentionality, which enables the robot to make use of certainmethods for obtaining goals, (2) identification with others, which enables it toindirectly experience others’ behavior, and (3) social communication, inwhichthe robot understands others’ behavior by ascribing it the intention that best explainsthe behavior.1. IntroductionImagine a robot that can understand and produce a complete repertoire ofhuman communicative behavior, such as gestures and language. However,when this robot encounters novel behavior, it fails to understand it. Or, ifthe robot encounters a novel situation where any behavior in its repertoire doesnot work at all, it gets stuck. As long as the robot is preprogrammed accordingto a blueprint, it is best to take a design stance, instead of a intentionalstance, in trying to understand its behavior [5]. For instance, it would be difficultto engage the robot in an intentional activity of speech acts, e.g., makinga promise.Now imagine a robot that has learned and is still learning human communicativebehavior. Because the robot’s intelligence has no blueprint and itsrepertoire is incomplete and open to extensions and modifications, taking a designstance is no longer necessary. To some degree, the robot would be able to