TA2-1 Robot Meme: A Proposal of Human-Robot Memetic Mutual Adaptation

In late years, as new media turning into PC or mobile phone, a study about communication robots is prosperous. Robots are different from the conventional media, because robots have physical bodies like humans, so it is reported that humans bemust robots socially. Therefore, we decide to apply a concept of meme as a cultural gene to an interaction design with humans and robots in this study. By this design theory, we will realize Mimetic Mutual Adaptation by humans and robots imitating and adapting each other, exceeding a conventional form of oneway adaptation from humans to the media. Therefore, we called cultural information transmitted from robots "RobotMeme", we try that robots acquire cultural behaviors shared by human society and the robots transmits these meme to other robots by Human-Robot Mimetic Mutual Adaptation. Furthermore, we suggest "A Design of RobotMeme" to realize that robots create new cultural behaviors through human-robot interaction. In this paper, we describe an early stage of experiments to inspect whether RobotMeme were transmitted to human and observed that humans acquired original cultural behaviors of robots by imitation. From the results of these experiments, it is suggested that robots and human are going to be able to form the relations of interdependence by imitating each other.