Toward Teaching a Robot "Infant" using Emotive Communication Acts

This paper presents ongoing work towards building an autonomous robot that learns in a social context. The mode of social interaction is that of a caretaker-infant pair where a human acts as the caretaker for the robot. By placing our robot, Kismet, in an environment with a human caretaker who actively assists and guides Kismet's learning, this work explores robot learning in a similar environment to that of a developing infant. In doing so, this approach attempts to take advantage of this special sort of environment and the social interactions it affords in facilitating and constraining learning. This paper proposes an approach where emotive channels of communication are employed during social robot-human interactions to shape and guide what the robot learns. keywords: human-robot interaction, scaffolding, emotions