Prof. Minoru Asada presents Emergence of Human-Robot Interaction: Altruistic Behavior Through Minimization of Prediction Error

On 2019-04-29 - 2019-04-29 13:00:00 at E112, Karlovo náměstí 13, Praha 2
Abstract: The emergence of altruistic behavior in infants fosters
their social development and supports their involvement in our
society. Altruistic tendencies, intended to benefit others with no
apparent rewards, are also very useful for social robots that are
designed to be used in our households. Yet, to make robots capable of
learning how to help others as infants do, it is important to
understand the mechanisms and motives responsible for the development
of altruistic behavior. Further, understanding the mechanisms behind
the early development of pro-social behavior would be a great
contribution to the field of developmental psychology. To these ends,
we hypothesize that infants from 14 months of age help others to
minimize the differences between predicted actions and observations,
that is, to minimize prediction errors. To evaluate our hypothesis, we
created a computational model based on psychological studies and
implemented it in real and simulated robots. Our system first acquires
its own sensory-motor representation by interacting with its
environment. Then, using its experience, the system recognizes and
predicts others’ actions and uses this prediction to estimate a
prediction error. Our experiments demonstrated that our robots could
spontaneously generate helping behaviors by being motivated by the
minimization of prediction errors.
Responsible person: Petr Pošík