Robovie: an interactive humanoid robot

The authors have developed a robot called Robovie that has unique mechanisms designed for communication with humans. Robovie can generate human-like behaviors by using human-like actuators and vision and audio sensors. Software is a key element in the systems development. Two important ideas in human-robot communication through research from the viewpoint of cognitive science have been obtained - one is importance of physical expressions using the body and the other is the effectiveness of the robot's autonomy in the robot's utterance recognition by humans. Based on these psychological experiments, a new architecture that generates episode chains in interactions with humans is developed. The basic structure of the architecture is a network of situated modules. Each module consists of elemental behaviors to entrain humans and a behavior for communicating with humans.