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An Embodied Cognition Approach to Mindreading Skills for Socially Intelligent Robots

The Media Laboratory, MIT, Wiesner Building, E15, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA, cynthiab{at}media.mit.edu

Jesse Gray

The Media Laboratory, MIT, Wiesner Building, E15, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA, jg{at}media.mit.edu

Matt Berlin

The Media Laboratory, MIT, Wiesner Building, E15, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA, mattb{at}media.mit.edu

Future applications for personal robots motivate research into developing robots that are intelligent in their interactions with people. Toward this goal, in this paper we present an integrated socio-cognitive architecture to endow an anthropomorphic robot with the ability to infer mental states such as beliefs, intents, and desires from the observable behavior of its human partner. The design of our architecture is informed by recent findings from neuroscience and embodies cognition that reveals how living systems leverage their physical and cognitive embodiment through simulation-theoretic mechanisms to infer the mental states of others. We assess the robot's mindreading skills on a suite of benchmark tasks where the robot interacts with a human partner in a cooperative scenario and a learning scenario. In addition, we have conducted human subjects experiments using the same task scenarios to assess human performance on these tasks and to compare the robot's performance with that of people. In the process, our human subject studies also reveal some interesting insights into human behavior.

Key Words: Human-Robot interaction • social robot • cognitive architecture • social cognition • human-robot teamwork • learning from demonstration • perspective taking • mental models.

The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 28, No. 5, 656-680 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0278364909102796


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