Interacting with curious agents: User experience with interactive sculptural systems

Abstract

To enable long term, engaging social human-machine interaction, robots and other autonomous systems must be able to move beyond purely reactive interaction control strategies, and engage in shared-initiative interaction. In this paper, we describe an implementation of an interactive art sculpture which generates interactive behaviours using curiosity-based learning. Using its own internal motivation formulated as a curiosity drive, the system initiates interaction with and responds to human visitors, generating continuously evolving interactive behaviours. The proposed system was tested in a user study with a prototype interactive sculpture installation.