Theatrical approach: Designing human-like behaviour in humanoid robots

Abstract

A key challenge in designing humanoid robots is producing natural and human-like behaviour. This study addressed this challenge by developing an instructive interface to design natural and human-like behaviour in a humanoid robot that will be helpful not only for professional robot motion designers but also for nonprofessionals. A staging method called contemporary colloquial theatre theory has been developed in the field of theatre to reproduce the natural behaviour of humans. Based on the theory, to design robot behaviour, we extracted implicit knowledge from a director’s instructions given to a robot actor in a robot theatre project, where the robot functions as an actor and interacts with human actors. This paper shows the validity of applying this knowledge extraction method by means of a public stage play entitled Night On The Milky Way Train and two short plays created for the purpose of carrying out an analysis. Our analysis produced important rules for designing the behaviour of humanoid robots. The rules were extracted in forms suited to the instructive function of the interface. In this paper, we report the results of a subjective experiment conducted to verify the effectiveness of this function. Our experimental results suggest that the rules derived are effective in improving robot behaviour.