Learning Social Behaviors During Human-Robot Play

The Problem: This work explores socially situated learning by exploiting the types of interaction that arise between a nurturing caretaker and an immature learner. Here, the learner is an anthropomorphic robotic platform. Its primary sensory inputs include vision, audition, and joint rotation of its degrees of freedom. Its outputs include vocalizations, head and eye orientation, and facial expressions. The robot is designed to be an altricial system, similar in spirit to a human infant. That is, the robot starts off in a rather helpless and primitive condition, and requires the help of a sophisticated and benevolent caretaker to learn and develop. The interaction between the caretaker robot is purely social, much like how a mother interacts with her infant. The sorts of capabilities targeted for learning are those social and communication skills exhibited by human infants within the first year of life.