Abstract. Behavior or Appearance? This is fundamental problem in robot development. Namely, not only the behavior but also the appearance of a robot influences human-robot interaction. There is, however, no research approach to tackling this problem. In order to state the problem, we have developed an android robot that has similar appearance as humans and several actuators generating micro behaviors. This paper proposes a new research direction based on the android robot.

This paper presents a new research platform, CB 2 , a child robot with biomimetic body for cognitive developmental robotics [1] developed by the Socially-Synergistic Intelligence (Hereafter, Socio-SI) group of JST ERATO Asada Project. The Socio-SI group has focused on the design principles of communicative and intelligent machines and human social development through building a humanoid robot that has physical and perceptual structures close to us, that enables safe and close interactions with humans. For this purpose, CB 2 was designed, especially in order to establish and maintain a long-term social interaction between human and robot. The most significant features of CB 2 are a whole-body soft skin (silicon surface with many tactile sensors underneath) and flexible joints (51 pneumatic actuators). The fundamental capabilities and the preliminary experiments are shown, and the future work is discussed.

Physical HumanRobot Interaction C lose physical interaction between robots and humans is a particularly challenging aspect of robot development. For successful interaction and cooperation, the robot must have the ability to adapt its behavior to the human counterpart. Based on our earlier work, we present and evaluate a computationally efficient machine learning algorithm that is well suited for such close-contact interaction scenarios. We show that this algorithm helps to improve the quality of the interaction between a robot and a human caregiver. To this end, we present two human-in-the-loop learning scenarios that are inspired by human parenting behavior, namely, an assisted standing-up task and an assisted walking task. Human-Robot Interaction and CooperationUntil recently, robotic systems mostly remained in the realm of industrial applications and academic research. However, in recent years, robotics technology has significantly matured and produced highly realistic android robots. As a result of this ongoing process, the application domains of robots have slowly expanded into domestic environments, offices, and other human-inhabited locations. In turn, interaction and cooperation between humans and robots has become an increasingly important and, at the same time, challenging aspect of robot development. Particularly challenging is the physical interaction and cooperation between humans and robots. For such interaction to be successful and meaningful, the following technical difficulties need to be addressed:

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Our research goal is to discover the principles underlying natural communication among individuals and to establish a methodology for the development of expressive humanoid robots. For this purpose we have developed androids that closely resemble human beings. The androids enable us to investigate a number of phenomena related to human interaction that could not otherwise be investigated with mechanical-looking robots. This is because more human-like devices are in a better position to elicit the kinds of responses that people direct toward each other. Moreover, we cannot ignore the role of appearance in giving us a subjective impression of human presence or intelligence. However, this impression is influenced by behavior and the complex relationship between appearance and behavior. This paper proposes a hypothesis about how appearance and behavior are related, and maps out a plan for android research to investigate this hypothesis. We then examine a study that evaluates the human likeness of androids according to the gaze behavior they elicit. Studies such as these, which integrate the development of androids with the investigation of human behavior, constitute a new research area that fuses engineering and science.

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