Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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to “lubricate” the interface between themselves and their human interlocutors
but also to promote survival, self-maintenance, learning, decision making,
attention, and more (Breazeal, 2002a, 2003c,d). Hence, social and affective
interactions with people are valued not just at the interface but at a pragmatic
and functional level for the robot as well.
Humans, however, are the most socially and emotionally advanced of
all species. As one might imagine, an autonomous anthropomorphic robot
that could interpret, respond, and deliver human-style social and affective
cues is quite a sophisticated machine. We have explored the simplest kind
of human-style social interaction (guided and inspired by what occurs between
a human infant with its caregiver) and have used this as a metaphor
for building a sociable robot, called Kismet (shown in Fig. 10.1). The robot
has been designed to support several social and emotive skills and mechanisms
that are outlined in the rest of this chapter. Kismet is able to use these
capabilities to enter into rich, flexible, dynamic interactions with people that
are physical, affective, and social.
Surprise Happy Sad
Fear
Disgust Interest
Figure 10.1. A sample of Kismet’s facial expressions for basic emotions (see
text). Kismet is about 1.5 times the size of an adult human head and has a
total of 21 degrees of freedom. The robot perceives a variety of natural social
cues from visual and auditory channels. Kismet has four cameras to visually
perceive its environment: one behind each eye for postattentive visual
processing (e.g., face detection), one between the eyes to provide a wide
peripheral view (to track bright colors, skin tone, and movement), and one in
the “nose” that is used in stereo with the peripheral-view camera to estimate
the distance to targeted objects. A human wears a lavalier microphone to
speak to the robot. (Images courtesy of Sam Ogden, © 2000.)