Mimetic Communication Theory for Humanoid Robots Interacting with Humans

The theory of behavioral communication for humanoid robots that interact with humans is discussed in this paper. For behavioral communication, it is fundamental for a humanoid robot to recognize the meaning of the whole body motion of ahuman. According to the previous works, it can be done in the symbolic level by adopting the proto-symbol space de ned by the Hidden Markov Models based on the mimesis theory. The generation of robot motions from the proto-symbols is also to be done in the same framework. In this paper, we rst introduce the meta proto-symbols that stochastically represent and become signi ants of the interaction of a robot and a human. The meta proto-symbols are a little more abstract analogy of the proto-symbols and recognize/generate the relationship of the two. A hypothesis is then proposed as the principle of fundamental communication. The experimental result follows