Sociable dining table: Incremental meaning acquisition based on mutual adaptation process

Abstract

Our main goal is to explore how social interaction can evolve incrementally and be materialized in a protocol of communication. We intend to study how the human establishes a protocol of communication in a context that requires mutual adaptation. Sociable Dining Table (SDT) integrates a dish robot put on the table and behaves according to the knocks that the human emits. To achieve our goal, we conducted two experiments: a human-controller experiment (Wizard-of-Oz) and a human-robot interaction (HRI) experiment. The aim of the first experiment is to understand how people are building a protocol of communication. We suggest an actor-critic architecture that simulates in an open ended way the adaptive behavior that we have seen in the first experiment. We show in a human-robot interaction (HRI) experiment that our method enables the adaptation to the individual preferences in order to get a personalized protocol of communication.