The Problem: One of the fundamental social skills for humans is a theory of other minds. This set of skills allows us to attribute beliefs, goals, and desires to other individuals. To take part in normal human social dynamics, a robot must not only know about the properties of objects, but also the properties of animate agents in the world. This research project attempts to implement basic soci...

In 1991, Ballard [2] described the implications of having a visual system that could actively position the camera in response to physical stimuli. In humanoid robotic systems, or in any animate vision system that interacts with people, social dynamics provide additional levels of constraint and provide additional opportunities for processing economy. In this paper, we describe an integrated vis...

In this paper we discuss the use of interactive environments in autism therapy. In particular we review the Aurora project and summarise the results of three studies within Aurora project, one using a non-humanoid mobile robot, one using a small humanoid doll robot, and the last using a touch sensitive screen. All three studies seek, in different ways, to promote social skills and an enhanced s...

T is known that the concept of “robot” itself is very old. However, it is only recently that humanoid and pet-type robots have appeared as commercial products in daily life, and images of “robots” widely vary from robot-arms in factories to human-sized humanoid robots. Thus, when we consider “roboethics,” we should assume a concrete combination of robot types and issues to be considered. If we ...

To be accepted as a part of our everyday lives, companion robots will require the capability to communicate socially, recognizing people's behavior and responding appropriately. In particular, we hypothesized that a humanoid robot especially should be able to recognize affectionate touches conveying liking or dislike, because the humanoid form elicits expectations of a high degree of social int...

This paper introduces an open architecture humanoid robotics platform (OpenHRP for short) on which various building blocks of humanoid robotics can be investigated. OpenHRP is a virtual humanoid robot platform with a compatible humanoid robot, and consists of a simulator of humanoid robots and motion control library for them which can also be applied to a compatible humanoid robot as it is. Ope...

A Personal robot, which is expected to become popular in the future, is required to be active in joint work and community life with humans. Therefore, the purpose of this study is the development of new mechanisms and functions for a humanoid robot that has the ability to express human-like emotion and communicate naturally with a human, in order to realize a personal robot. Recently, the Emoti...

How is communicative gesture behavior in robots perceived by humans? Although gesture is a crucial feature of social interaction, this research question is still largely unexplored in the field of social robotics. The present work thus sets out to investigate how robot gesture can be used to design and realize more natural and human-like communication capabilities for social robots. The adopted...

This paper introduces an open architecture humanoid robotics platform (OpenHRP for short) on which various building blocks of humanoid robotics can be investigated. OpenHRP is a virtual humanoid robot platform with a compatible humanoid robot, and consists of a simulator of humanoid robots and motion control library for them which can also be applied to a compatible humanoid robot as it is. Ope...

In this paper, we present a new method for humanoid robot arm motion planning satisfying multiple constraints. In our method, the humanoid robot arm motion generation is formulated as an optimization problem. Four different constraints, which cover a wide range of humanoid robot tasks, are considered: minimum time, minimum distance, robot hand acceleration and constant joint angular velocity. R...