How can multimodal cues from child-directed interaction reduce learning complexity in robots?

Authors: Rohlfing, Katharina J.; Fritsch, Jannik; Wrede, Britta; Jungmann, Tanja

Source: Advanced Robotics, Volume 20, Number 10, 2006 , pp. 1183-1199(17)

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Abstract:

Robots have to deal with an enormous amount of sensory stimuli. One solution in making sense of them is to enable a robot system to actively search for cues that help structuring the information. Studies with infants reveal that parents support the learning-process by modifying their interaction style, dependent on their child's developmental age. In our study, in which parents demonstrated everyday actions to their preverbal children (8-11 months old), our aim was to identify objective parameters for multimodal action modification. Our results reveal two action parameters being modified in adult-child interaction: roundness and pace. Furthermore, we found that language has the power to help children structuring actions sequences by synchrony and emphasis. These insights are discussed with respect to the built-in attention architecture of a socially interactive robot, which enables it to understand demonstrated actions. Our algorithmic approach towards automatically detecting the task structure in child-designed input demonstrates the potential impact of insights from developmental learning on robotics. The presented findings pave the way to automatically detect when to imitate in a demonstration task.

Keywords: LEARNING MECHANISMS; MULTI-MODAL MOTHERESE; CHILD-DIRECTED INPUT; MOTIONESE

Document Type: Short communication

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156855306778522532

Publication date: 2006-10-01