Fusing autonomy and sociability in robots

Abstract

Quoting some robotic examples, I will list some key issues in fusing autonomy and sociability: tools and control architecture, attention, behavior matching, embodiment, similarity, and imitation. 1 Introduction An ideal agent should have a good mixture of autonomy and sociability; Autonomous enough to do things properly even without speci#c commands. Sociable enough to properly communicate with you and help you do arbitrary tasks. These two modes must be fused together at all levels of complexity, because the level of your request vary quickly and drastically, often intervening the ongoing task. The request level can be as low as primitve motion or as high as an entire project. The word #autonomous" means self governing, no external control and independent. At an extreme, it can have a countermeaning to #sociable". A robotic example would be the #arti#cial insect robots" created by Rodney Brooks' group. They had high degrees of autonomy and could survive in realistic envrironmen...