Natural Human Robot Meta-communication through the Integration of Android's Sensors with Environment Embedded Sensors

Building robots that closely resemble humans allows us to study phenomena that cannot be studied using mechanical-looking robots in our daily human-to-human natural interactions. This is supported by the fact that human-like devices can more easily elicit the same kind of responses that people use in their natural interactions. However, several studies support the close and complex relationship existing between outer appearance and the behavior by the robot. Yet, human-like appearance, as Masahiro Mori observed, is not enough to give a positive impression. The robot has to behave closely to humans, and is to have a sense of perception that enables it to communicate with humans. Our past experience with android “Geminoid HI-1” demonstrated that the sensors equipping the robot are not enough to perform human-like communication, mainly because of a limited sensing range. To overcome this problem, we endowed the environment around the robot with perceptive capabilities by embedding sensors such as cameras into it. This paper reports a preliminary study about the improvement of the controlling system by integrating cameras in the surrounding environment, so that the android ca be given human-like perception. The integration of the development of androids and the investigations of human behaviors constitute a new research area merging engineering and cognitive sciences