Sociable Dining Table: Meaning Acquisition Exploration in Knock-Based Proto-Communication.

In order to build social robots that can coexist with human beings, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of how communication protocols are developed in human-robot interactions. Our main goal is to explore how a communication protocol can be established incrementally between a human and our minimally designed robot which is called sociable dining table (SDT). SDT integrates a dish robot put on the table and behaves according to the knocks that a human emits. To achieve our goal, we conducted two experiments: a human-human experiment (Wizard-of-Oz) and a human-robot interaction (HRI) experiment. The aim of the first experiment was to explore how people build a protocol of communication. Based on the first experiment, we suggested an actor-critic architecture that simulated in an open-ended way the adaptive behavior which we determine in the first experiment. After that, we demonstrated in the HRI experiment how our actor-critic architecture enabled the adaptation to individual preferences in order to obtain a personalized protocol of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]