"Lifelike" behavior of communication robots based on developmental psychology findings

Researchers in developmental psychology have reported various findings about animate-inanimate distinctions, especially the decision criteria of human infants categorizing animate existence, such as distinguishing animals and humans from the inanimate. The purpose of our research is to develop animate or "lifelike" behavior for humanoid robots based on such categorizing, which would be expected to potentially make human-robot interaction more natural. Our approach is unique because we focus on the robot\´s mechanism and behavior design using environmental sensors. Consequently, we use a motion capturing system, which enables us to leapfrog technological developments for the robots\´ sensing abilities. The robot that we have developed reacts to human behavior, and it is implemented in order to satisfy the features of animate existence according to developmental psychology. Two experiments were conducted to verify its effects. The results of the first experiment verified the effectiveness of lifelike behavior and also showed that random behavior, which partly satisfies the features of animate existence, received a halfway evaluation for lifelikeness. The second experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed robot for investigating the effect of a robot\´s cognitive ability for human-robot interaction