“No” is one of the first ten words used by children and embodies the first form of linguistic negation. Despite its early occurrence, the details of its acquisition remain largely unknown. The circumstance that “no” cannot be construed as a label for perceptible objects or events puts it outside the scope of most modern accounts of language acquisition. Moreover, most symbol grounding architectures will struggle to ground the word due to its non-referential character. The presented work extends symbol grounding to encompass affect and motivation. In a study involving the child-like robot iCub, we attempt to illuminate the acquisition process of negation words. The robot is deployed in speech-wise unconstrained interaction with participants acting as its language teachers. The results corroborate the hypothesis that affect or volition plays a pivotal role in the acquisition process. Negation words are prosodically salient within prohibitive utterances and negative intent interpretations such that they can be easily isolated from the teacher’s speech signal. These words subsequently may be grounded in negative affective states. However, observations of the nature of prohibition and the temporal relationships between its linguistic and extra-linguistic components raise questions over the suitability of Hebbian-type algorithms for certain types of language grounding.

In recent years the robotics field has witnessed an interesting new trend. Several companies started the production of service robots whose aim is to cooperate with humans. The robots developed so far are either rather expensive or unsuitable for manipulation tasks. This article presents the result of a project which wishes to demonstrate the feasibility of an affordable humanoid robot. R1 is able to navigate, and interact with the environment (grasping and carrying objects, operating switches, opening doors etc). The robot is also equipped with a speaker, microphones and it mounts a display in the head to support interaction using natural channels like speech or (simulated) eye movements. The final cost of the robot is expected to range around that of a family car, possibly, when produced in large quantities, even significantly lower. This goal was tackled along three synergistic directions: use of polymeric materials, light-weight design and implementation of novel actuation solutions. These lines, as well as the robot with its main features, are described hereafter.

We overview how sensorimotor experience can be operationalized for interaction scenarios in which humanoid robots acquire skills and linguistic behaviours via enacting a “form-of-life” in interaction games (following Wittgenstein) with humans. The enactive paradigm is introduced which provides a powerful framework for the construction of complex adaptive systems, based on interaction, habit, and experience. Enactive cognitive architectures (following insights of Varela, Thompson and Rosch) that we have developed support social learning and robot ontogeny by harnessing information-theoretic methods and raw uninterpreted sensorimotor experience to scaffold the acquisition of behaviours. The success criterion here is validation by the robot engaging in ongoing human-robot interaction with naive participants who, over the course of iterated interactions, shape the robot's behavioural and linguistic development. Engagement in such interaction exhibiting aspects of purposeful, habitual recurring structure evidences the developed capability of the humanoid to enact language and interaction games as a successful participant.

The purpose of this half-day workshop is to explore the role of social gaze in human-robot interaction, both how to measure social gaze behavior by humans and how to implement it in robots that interact with them. Gaze directed at an interaction partner has become a subject of increased attention in human-robot interaction research. While traditional robotics research has focused work on robot gaze solely on the identification and manipulation of objects, researchers in HRI have come to recognize that gaze is a social behavior in addition to a way of sensing the world. This workshop will approach the problem of understanding the role of social gaze in human-robot interaction from the dual perspectives of investigating human-human gaze for design principles to apply to robots and of experimentally evaluating human-robot gaze interaction in order to assess how humans engage in gaze behavior with robots.

Mutual gaze is an important aspect of face-to-face communication that arises from the interaction of the gaze behavior of two individuals. In this dual eye-tracking study, gaze data was collected from human conversational pairs with the goal of gaining insight into what characteristics of the conversation partners influence this behavior. We investigate the link between personality, familiarity and mutual gaze. The results found indicate that mutual gaze behavior depends on the characteristics of both partners rather than on either individual considered in isolation. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of socially appropriate gaze controllers for robots that interact with people.