Geminoid: Teleoperated Android of an Existing Person

Why are people attracted to humanoid robots and androids? The answer is simple: because human beings are attuned to understand or interpret human expressions and behaviors, especially those that exist in their surroundings. As they grow, infants, who are supposedly born with the ability to discriminate various types of stimuli, gradually adapt and fine-tune their interpretations of detailed social clues from other voices, languages, facial expressions, or behaviors (Pascalis et al., 2002). Perhaps due to this functionality of nature and nurture, people have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize nearly everything they encounter. This is also true for computers or robots. In other words, when we see PCs or robots, some automatic process starts running inside us that tries to interpret them as human. The media equation theory (Reeves & Nass, 1996) first explicitly articulated this tendency within us. Since then, researchers have been pursuing the key element to make people feel more comfortable with computers or creating an easier and more intuitive interface to various information devices. This pursuit has also begun spreading in the field of robotics. Recently, researcher’s interests in robotics are shifting from traditional studies on navigation and manipulation to human-robot interaction. A number of researches have investigated how people respond to robot behaviors and how robots should behave so that people can easily understand them (Fong et al., 2003; Breazeal, 2004; Kanda et al., 2004). Many insights from developmental or cognitive psychologies have been implemented and examined to see how they affect the human response or whether they help robots produce smooth and natural communication with humans. However, human-robot interaction studies have been neglecting one issue: the "appearance versus behavior problem." We empirically know that appearance, one of the most significant elements in communication, is a crucial factor in the evaluation of interaction (See Figure 1). The interactive robots developed so far had very mechanical outcomes that do appear as “robots.” Researchers tried to make such interactive robots “humanoid” by equipping them with heads, eyes, or hands so that their appearance more closely resembled human beings and to enable them to make such analogous human movements or gestures as staring, pointing, and so on. Functionality was considered the primary concern in improving communication with humans. In this manner, many studies have compared robots with different behaviors. Thus far, scant attention has been paid to robot appearances. Although