First steps toward natural human-like HRI

Natural human-like human-robot interaction (NHL-HRI) requires the robot to be skilled both at recognizing and producing many subtle human behaviors, often taken for granted by humans. We suggest a rough division of these requirements for NHL-HRI into three classes of properties: (1) social behaviors, (2) goal-oriented cognition, and (3) robust intelligence, and present the novel DIARC architecture for complex affective robots for human-robot interaction, which aims to meet some of those requirements. We briefly describe the functional properties of DIARC and its implementation in our ADE system. Then we report results from human subject evaluations in the laboratory as well as our experiences with the robot running ADE at the 2005 AAAI Robot Competition in the Open Interaction Event and Robot Exhibition.