Journal Paper

This paper presents an overview of our work towards building socially intelligent, cooperative humanoid robots that can work and learn in partnership with people. People understand each other in social terms, allowing them to engage others in a variety of complex social interactions including communication, social learning, and cooperation. We present our theoretical framework that is a novel combination of Joint Intention Theory and Situated Learning Theory and demonstrate how this framework can be applied to develop our sociable humanoid robot, Leonardo. We demonstrate the robot’s ability to learn quickly and effectively from natural human instruction using gesture and dialog, and then cooperate to perform a learned task jointly with a person. Such issues must be addressed to enable many new and exciting applications for robots that require them to play a long-term role in people’s daily lives.