1

Social Robot Partners: Still Sci-fi?

Kadir Firat Uyanik

KOVAN Research Lab.

Dept. of Computer Eng.
Middle East Technical Univ.
Ankara, Turkey
kadir@ceng.metu.edu.tr

Abstract—Designing a man-made-man has always been

one of the most exciting dreams of humankind. It has
attracted many scientists, engineers and inquisitive people
through the history of technology. Particularly in the last
decade, many roboticists have shifted their fields of interest
from robotic manipulation and navigation to humanoid
science (e.g. human-robot interaction, social robots, robot
learning etc.). Although computational power, sensor tech-
nology and production techniques advanced a lot, the world
is still waiting for the first heartbeat signal of a robot being
able to recognize itself and its environment, walk around
without falling over, communicate with people, do daily-life
tasks for/with people and learn how to behave properly
in an unanticipated situation. However, it is obvious that Fig. 1. First programmable humanoid robotic system
robotics still has a long way to go. The question is “How
much complicated can it really be?”.
designed a humanoid automaton, 1495. Leonardo’s robot
I. I NTRODUCTION was capable of doing humanlike movements such as,
sitting up, moving it’s arms and neck, and anatomically
A. Historical Notes
correct jaw. Late in the 1700s, Wolfgang von Kempelen
Artificial humans, human-shaped mechanisms and built the Turk, a chess-playing humanoid automaton
human-like automata are nothing new for mankind. The controlled by a human staying inside the cabinet. In
Greek myths, such as Hephaestus and Talos, talks about the same century, Jacques de Vaucanson built The Flute
golden robots and bronze human machines. A Chinese Player, a life-size figure of a shepherd, and also The
artificer Yan Shi designed a mechanical handiwork [1] Tambourine Player that plays a flute and a tambourine.
which is able to sing and act, BC 1000s. In the eighth Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son and Jean-Frederic Leschot
century, the Muslim alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan (la- built the Musician, the drawer and the writer which are
tinized as Geber), gives recipes of artificial slave humans controlled by operators so as to realize some basic works,
in his Book of Stones based on the ultimate goal,takwin1 . such as playing an instrument, drawing a woman’s
Ebu’l Iz (=Al-Jazari) is known as the creator of the first picture and writing 40-letter long texts.
programmable humanoid robot, 1206 [2]. His mecha-
Throughout years of study, humanoid robots became
nism was a programmable drum machine consisting of
more and more complicated. After the mid of the 20th
four automatic musicians in a boat floating in a lake to
century, many theoretical models of biped locomotion
entertain guests during royal drinking parties. Melody
are suggested and the first active anthropomorphic ex-
of the music is changed by moving pegs in what may
oskeleton was built [6] at the Waseda University in
be called programming. According to Charles B. Fowler,
Tokyo. During 90’s, there were many humanoid robots
”more than fifty facial and body actions can be generated
like famous ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative MO-
during each musical selection”[3]. Leonardo Da Vinci
bility)being able to walk on two legs and even run fairly
1 The act of takwin is an emulation of the divine, creative and life- enough, or like the robot Cog being designed by Rodney
giving powers of God. Brooks from MIT which is intended to emulate human

Fig. 2. Left:Leonardo’s robot, a knight. Right:Reconstruction of the
Turk, a Chess playing humanoid robot controlled by a human operator
helicopters performing inverted-flight [10], and even
been to Mars[29]. As a next step, they will enter probably
the most sophisticated environment, our living rooms (!).
They should not only act on physical objects around
them, but also interact with people. They should be
capable of not only doing things for us, but also with us,
which necessitates generating proper actions in unantic-
ipated situations and understanding of human believes,
desires, and physical actions. Hence, those robots should
setup a human-centric communication, move around
the environment particularly designed for people, make
sense of what they see, hear and touch, and learn doing
things in a social manner.

thought and learn how to behave by experiencing the

A. Appearance and Interactive Behaviors
world as we humans do.Today, robotics community tries
to make robots more social, more dexterous and more People try to make animals, plants or even inanimate
mobile, or in short, much more humanlike. objects talk, walk, see and think or in a way pretend
to behave like a human. There are many examples of
this attempt in the movies (iRobot, Artificial Intelligence,
B. Converging to human day by day Transformers, Wall-e, Short Circuit etc.), cartoons (Irona
Sixty five years ago, there was only one working in Richey Rich, Rossie in Jetsons), toy designs, adver-
computer in the world. A computer to debug a program tisements but more seriously in robotics science.
of which you should open it up and walk inside (see The There are several concerns about the humanlikeness of
first computer bug, in the collections of the US Naval the robots, like appearance and behavior. To tackle with
Historical Center). More strangely, people of that time these problems two different approaches are necessary.
have confidently predicted that United States will only One is from a robotics science point of view, that is
need six of these machines which is certainly not the building humanlike robots based on the knowledge from
case today. cognitive science. The other one is from a cognitive
Just 40 years after the first computer, we got robots, science which uses robots to verify hypotheses to under-
at least, working in the factories where environment is stand humans. This interdisciplinary framework is called
well structured and working space is fully under control.
Nevertheless, RoboCup2 , aims to build a team of fully
autonomous humanoid robot soccer players that shall
win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of
the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World
Cup, by 2050. This may imply that we can have robot
partners, companions and assistants in 40 years, like we
have computers, laptops and pda’s today.
The rest of this article examines how scientists cope
with the issues related to the humanlikeness of the robots
mainly in terms of appearance and intelligence.

II. T O B E H UMANLIKE
Information technology has made a remarkable
progress recently. Internet, networking and communi-
cation advanced, and the form of communication and
social life changed considerably. Until now, robots have
been to oceans[27] and volcanoes[28]. They’ve become
Fig. 3. Ishiguro and his android twin
2 one of the most well known annual robotics competition that was
started in 1997, see for detailed information www.robocup.org as android science[9] by many Japanese roboticists, like

2
Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro, whose lab has child and adult
sized androids including his electromechanical twin,
figure 3. This robot, Geminoid [11], is not able to walk or
create complicated movements autonomously. It is tele-
operated by Ishiguro since AI technology is inadequate,
for now, to create humanlike conversations. As it can
be seen from the figure 4, captured sound and the lip
movements are encoded and transmitted through internet
to the Geminoid server. Server maintains the state of
the conversation and generates necessary outputs by
evaluating the input data packet and the state of the
conversation. It also generates unconscious behaviors
such as breathing, blinking and other hand and head
movements.
Ishiguro investigates the followings by developing this
robot;
• How we define humanlikeness,
• What human existence and presence mean,
• How recognition mechanism works in human brain,
• Is intelligence or long term communication crucial
factor in overcoming the uncanny valley.
Fig. 5. Simplified version of the figure in [13].
Uncanny valley is a hypothesis introduced by
Masahiro Mori in 1970 [13]. It represents a revulsion
among human observers which happens when robots
and any other thing resembling to humans act almost
but not entirely like actual humans.To bridge this valley,
robot’s behaviors and communication capabilities should
be as familiar as possible to the humans. An interac-
tion that increases familiarity and makes communication
smoother is called as social interaction [14]. Although
it seems unnecessary, humans chat with each other to
accomplish tasks. This interaction may not have an
explicit purpose of information exchange, but it serves as
3
the basis of smooth communication. That’s why, humans
will tend to prefer more familiar, in a way more social,
robots as their partners among the robots having identical
functionalities.
Fig. 6. The Robot Robovie is managing a conversation (adapted from
B. Mutlu et al. 2009)
A communication robot should have capabilities that
androids don’t have yet. Firstly, this robot should be self-
contained in terms of its actuation mechanisms, which
makes communication more effective. This means, there
shouldn’t be any wire or other links that prevents robot
from moving around, or communication mechanisms like
speakers or microphones outside of the robot’s body,
again limit its travel area. Haptic communication is also
important which makes communication more familiar
requiring touch sensors on the body of the robot.
Communication robots are supposed to serve various
kinds of informational tasks (e.g.museum guide, infor-
mation booth personnel, shop assistant etc). This requires
enhanced communication skills like managing turn-
taking behavior and performing appropriate listening
behavior. During conversation, people switches between
different participant roles, such as speaker and addressee.
However, it is fairly possible that there might be other
side participants and also non-participant bystanders and
over-hearers. Although communication robots are still
not capable of recognizing speech robustly and generat-
ing speech adaptively, it is proved that gaze behaviors
play an important role in establishing and maintaining
those conversational roles [15].
B. Intelligence and Learning
A humanoid robot should be able to adapt itself to
the dynamically changing circumstances and it should
also be a quick learner to be useful in human populated
Fig. 4. Overall system and data flow in Geminoid System[12].
environments. The degree of intelligence of a robot
is generally understood as how much successful it is
in a task or several tasks. For an intelligent robot,
achieving a goal or accomplishing a task depends on its
perception, decision making and actuation capabilities.
Although actuation is not totally solved yet, like in the
robot ASIMO ( it has zero-moment point theory based
control and non-regenerative actuation system -highly
inefficient-) or the robot Petman[16] ( it is the first
robot moving dynamically like a real person with its
heel-toe type walking pattern yet having a combustion
engine -improper for indoor environments-), perception
and learning are not even that much promising.
1) Perception: Humanoid robots should be aware of
themselves, they also should get necessary information
from the outside world to behave successfully. Today self
awareness can be mimicked by using several sensors,
such as motor encoders, force and tactile sensors, poten-
tiometers etc. to obtain proprioceptive information; gyro-
accelerometer couples are used to get the information
about posture alignment, microphones are for audial in-
formation. Stereo cameras and other superhuman sensors
( infrared range cameras or ultrasonic range finders) are
used as vision sensors.
The problem is, robots never ”understand” what they
sense. They pretend as if they sensed by utilizing the
algorithms that are just the interpretations of the roboti-
cists. Unfortunately, scientists still don’t know how ex-
actly human brain interprets the electrical signals which
are similar to the numerical values that robots obtain
from their sensors.
4
Robot vision is one of the major problems in per-
ception. An example is grasping of novel objects that
are seen for the first time. Stereo cameras are not
good enough if the objects are textureless or they
are transparent. Time of flight range cameras are low
resolution sensors, and laser range finders necessitates
too much time to scan 3D. Although stereopsis or 3D
reconstruction works well, only visible portions of the
object can be reconstructed. One solution is not to try
to obtain whole 3D representation of the object but
learn how to use partial shape information to find an
optimum grasping point [17], [18], [19] by computing
and evaluating several features, such as contact area,
contact symmetry, force closure and so on.
However, another problem with objects is the un-
derstanding of their permanence. Human infants obtain
knowledge of their environment by interacting with the
objects. One of the milestones in developing this ability
is learning the permanence of objects or conception
of physical causality. That is, knowing the continuity
of the existence of an object even it is occluded by
other objects. This requires extracting information about
an object depending on the state of its environment.
Recently, a model of situation-dependent predictor is
proposed in [20]. This model consists of four major
modules, such as attention, environment, predictor se-
lector and motion predictor modules which are briefly
explained in figure 7.
Not only visual recognition but also audial recognition
has similar problems. One of the major problem is
discrimination of the sound source of interest (SoI) or
Fig. 7. A model of physical causality perception. Attention module extracts the geometrical information of the object and its surroundings. In
environment module this information is self organized by Restricted Boltzmann Machine type network[21] and the next position of the object
is calculated by prediction module based on the current state of the object and its environment [20].
detection of sound source location (SSL). Although there
are several methods to detect SSL, such as receiver
operating characteristic analysis [30] or time-delay of
arrival based approaches [31], speech recognition and
mood detection is still a crucial problem in the human
communication partner case.
Researchers, in a way, neglects these problems, so
as to deal with higher level problems, by utilizing
teleoperation systems in which perception ability is
distributed to the environment by adding multi infrared
range camera setup (motion capture system) to obtain
more complete information about the object of interest,
or piezoelectric pressure sensors to the floor ground
to locate communication partners (e.g. addressee or
bystander partners during a conversation), or multiple
microphones to locate SoI, or remote control panels to
control some of the higher level behaviors of the robot,
like the robot Geminoid (see figure 4) and the Robonaut
of NASA [22].
2) Learning: Social robot partners are supposed to
work in environments designed in a human-centered
manner.That is, those robots will come up with highly
changing circumstances and they should adapt their ca-
pabilities according to those changes and add new skills
to their repertoire quickly. Today, robots are suffering
from the computational complexity of the perception
algorithms, long-time requiring task learning phase, low
generalizablity of the learned behaviors between dif-
5
ferent agents and between different tasks for the same
agent. To deal with those problems scientists proposed
several techniques;
a) Reinforcement Learning:
In reinforcement learning (RL), a robot is rewarded or
punished according to the results of it’s interactions with
the environment. Learning is done by finding a policy
of actions that maximizes the subsequent award. If we
define accomplishing a task as the properly generated
action sequences, a robot -learning to achieve a goal-
actually learns what to do next in a particular state.
RL is successfully implemented on different plat-
forms, such as an autonomous helicopter which learns to
flight invertedly [10], a robot soccer team which learns
to keep the ball away from opponent robots[32], or a
humanoid robot learns how to play air-hockey against
a human opponent[33]. One difficulty with RL is that
the state-action space can be very large (slows down the
learning process and decreases the generalizability of the
learned tasks as well ), which is a usual case in highly
antropomorphic robots having large degree of freedom
body kinematics. A solution to this problem would be
manually defining or hard-coding some parts of the task
to be learn. For instance, in Atkeson’s work on air-
hockey playing, primitive behaviors are manually given
to the system which decreases the state-action space and
helps system to converge to the optimum action policy
much quicker.
 b) Affordance Learning:
J.J. Gibson introduced the concept of affordances em-
phasizing the relationships between the organism and
its environment[26]. Gibson claims that each action
needs only relevant perceptual feature for its execution
which can be supplied by dedicated filters -running
concurrently- to extract certain cues from the environ-
ment. This results in an immense perceptual economy.
He also mentions that an affordance is relative to the
organism. For instance, a bowling ball is liftable for an
adult, yet it is not for a little child.
This concept has been studied by various research
groups, commonly in terms of learning of consequences
of a particular action [24] or learning of invariant prop-
erties of environments that afford a certain action[25].
According to the representation given in figure 8 affor-
dances can be used to estimate outcomes of actions, to
plan actions to accomplish a task or to recognize objects
and actions of others. This representation has been
applied to various problems, such as directly ground-
ing symbolic planning operators to continuous sensory-
motor experiences[35], reaching goal-directed behaviors
from primitive behaviors by learning the effects of
actions on different objects [36], learning how to grasp
novel objects by learning local visual descriptors of good
grasping points [37], or learning traversability affordance
[38]. In the affordance study of Sahin et. al., affordance
is formalized as a nested triple of
(effect, (entity, behavior))
where entity represents the initial state of the envi-
ronment (directly perceived by the agent) before robot
performing the action, behavior is the mean by which
agent interact with the entity, and effect represents the
perceptual change of the entity ( including the object
of interest) after the behavior is applied. For instance,
a robot can obtain the relationship between a black-can
and the action it applied to this object as;
(lifted, (black-can, lift-with-right-hand))
In addition, if the same agent applies the same behavior
on a different can, let it be yellow, and obtains the same
effect, then it will generalize it’s representation as;
(lifted, (can, lift-with-right-hand))
Here, perception of the color of the object -can in this
case- looses it’s importance when the behavior lift-with-
right-hand is to be realized which is an example of
perceptual economy. Hence, a robot,learning via affor-
dances schema, does not try to extract an object model
to plan actions upon, yet it obtains its own representation
6
of the world in terms of several features including
shape, orientation, color and many other relevant factors.
Robot’s experiences with the objects are categorized (e.g.
via support vector machines) so as to build higher level
symbols of the world.
Fig. 8. Encoding affordances as relationships between actions, objects
and effects [34].
c) Social Learning:
There are some useful mechanisms to transfer knowledge
between agents (biological, computational or robotic
autonomous systems), such as social learning, be-
havior matching, imitation[7] and programming by
demonstration[23]. For instance, humans rely on im-
itation or observational learning in social interaction,
mostly to broaden their behavior repertoire, coordinate
interactional characteristics and ground the understand-
ings of other’s behaviors in own experience.
Psychologists proposed different theories about how
imitation ( i.e. social learning), occurs in the hu-
man infant. Three of them are active intermodal map-
ping(e.g. Meltzoff and Moore, 1983, 1994, 1997), asso-
ciative sequence learning(Heyes, 2001, 2005; Heyes and
Ray 2000) and the theory of goal directed imitation(
Wohlschlger et al., 2003). These theories explain how
matching behaviors are generated and correspondence
problem is bridged. Correspondence problem[8] is a cru-
cial problem in imitation which shows up when imitator
agent tries to find and execute sequence of actions, using
own embodiment, that are generated by a demonstrator
possibly having a dissimilar embodiment.
In robotics, one difficulty is the perception of the
counterpart. To overcome this problem, generally motion
capture systems are used to sense the movement of the
counterpart. However, obtaining the information about
the motion of the counterpart is inadequate, this data
should also be mapped to the robot’s frame of reference.
However, in this stage, the problem of ”what to imi-
tate” emerges. There are studies enabling robots to per-

Fig. 9. The problem of producing a behavior that matches an
observed one is due to the coding that represents observed and executed
movements. Things get more and more complicated if the agents
have different body kinematics. The picture is from the book Robot
Programming by Demonstration, by Sylvain Calinon.
ceive relevant aspects of the counterpart’s movements.
For instance, Breazeal and Scasselati’s [39] work on the
robots Cog and Kismet includes the detection of human
faces and eyes, and following human’s gaze direction.
Those robots are also capable of recognizing human
facial expressions and emotional vocalizations. Billiard
and Schaal’s work [40]also shows how to segment rel-
evant actions, that is, starting and finishing instances of
the action to be matched.
Inferring the goal of the demonstrator is another diffi-
culty. Currently, researchers set goals by hand. For exam-
ple, Alissandrakis et. al.’s work [41] shows how a robot
can be told to imitate at the ’path’ level, ’trajectory’ level
or ’end point’ level which correspond to imitation of
whole action, sub-goals only or goal only, respectively.
On the other hand, Billard et. al.’s work [42] shows how
a robot can infer the demonstrator’s goal. Their robot
extracts the invariants across each demonstrations ( e.g.
moving several different boxes by using left hand). The
robot starts to copy this behavior at the coarse level, by
replicating all the trajectory or path of the action, then it
obtains the crucial parts of the movement and it tries to
reach to the same results by using the actions that robot
has already know.
III. C ONCLUSION
Considering four decades of research and eminently
promising results, social robot partners are not a matter
of science-fiction anymore. Due to it’s multi interdisci-
plinary nature, robotics benefits from the advancements
in social sciences and engineering which results in a
growing community and rapidly accumulating knowl-
edge. Today, many researchers believe that robotics is
at the edge of a revolution like the computers in 80’s.
Although they have stronger groundings than Marvin
7
Minsky’s1 -former head of the AI Lab of MIT-, various
problems related to perception, control and learning
still makes us suspicious about having that dream robot
which is able to adapt itself to our highly dynamic envi-
ronment, understand and learn what we say, show, do and
even think in order to set up an intuitive communication.
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