A Motivational System for Regulating Human-Robot Interaction

This paper presents a motivational system for an autonomousrobot which is designed to regulate human-robot interaction. The modeof social interaction is that of a caretaker-infant dyad where a humanacts as the caretaker for the robot. An infant’s emotions and drives play a very important role in generating meaningful interactions with the caretaker, and regulating these interactions to maintain an environment suitable for the learning process (Bullowa 1979). Similarly, the learning task for the robot is to apply various communicationskills acquired during social exchanges to manipulate the caretaker such that its drives are satisfied. Toward this goal, the motivational system implements drives, emotions, and facial expressions. Although the details of the learning itself are beyondthe scope of this paper, this workrepresents an important step towardrealizing robots that can engage in meaningful bi-directional social interactions with humans.

Authors

• Cynthia Breazeal (Ferrell)

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