Abstract
Life-likeness is a property that can be used both to deceive people that a robot is more intelligent than it is or to facilitate the natural communication with humans. Over the years, different criteria have guided the design of intelligent systems, ranging from attempts to produce human-like language to trying to make a robot look like an actual human. We outline some relevant historical developments that all rely on different forms of mimicry of human life or intelligence. Many such approaches have been to some extent successful. However, we want to argue that there are ways to exploit aspects of life-likeness without deception. A life-like robot has advantages in communicating with humans, not because we believe it to be alive, but rather because we react instinctively to certain aspects of life-like behavior as this can make a robot easier to understand and allows us to better predict its actions. Although there may be reasons for trying to design robots that look exactly like humans for specific research purposes, we argue that it is subtle behavioral cues that are important for understandable robots rather than life-likeness in itself. To this end, we are developing a humanoid robot that will be able to show human-like movements while still looking decidedly robotic, thus exploiting the our ability to understand the behaviors of other people based on their movements.
Highlights
At the large robot exhibition in Osaka, all exhibition booths are empty
If pretending to be a live human is not the way to produce useful robots, how should robots be designed to allow an intuitive interaction with humans? We want to argue that there are many aspects of humans that should be reproduced but perhaps not the outer visual form as much as the detailed movements and non-verbal signals of a human. This is in line with the reasoning put forward by Fong et al (2003) that argue that caricatured humans may be more suitable because they avoid the uncanny valley. Towards this end we have designed the robot Epi (Figure 1), which is an attempt at an honest humanoid design in the sense that it is clear that it is a robot while it still tries to mimic the details of human-human interaction and reproduce a number of subtle non-verbal signals (Johansson et al, 2020)
The goal should not be to try to deceive that a machine is a human, but to construct robots that we can understand and interact with (Goodrich and Schultz, 2008)
Summary
At the large robot exhibition in Osaka, all exhibition booths are empty. All visitors have gathered in a large cluster in the middle of the room and are looking in the same direction. Designing life-like robots can be useful to facilitate interaction with humans, but we want to argue that imitation of life or human intelligence should not be a goal in itself. It is useful to mimic certain aspects of human behavior to facilitate the understanding of the robot as well as allowing natural communication between a robot and a human. We review attempts to mimic human appearance and behavior and investigate what aspects of life-likeness are useful in a robot. We argue that many of these research directions are partially based on deception and suggest that the important property of life-like machines is not that they appear to be alive or try to mimic actual humans, but rather that they can potentially be easier for people to understand and interact with. We outline our work on a humanoid robot that aims at imitating some aspects of human behavior without pretending to be anything but a robot
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