Off-loaded Mind and Communication Musicality

Gateway event Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

I have been developing a human-like android, ALTER, since 2016. I believe that there are three elements that make an android behave like a human. The first is appearance. This prepares them to be treated as people. The second is autonomy. Autonomy means that the android does not need any external input to decide what to do. It is the processes that go on internally that give androids their autonomy. The third element is communication. Imitating others is the ignition point of communication in early childhood.

Alter3 is equipped with tiny cameras in their eyes that allow them to mimic the poses of others. This is one of the means of communication. Imitation is the first step in human communication. We let the two androids, Alter 2 and 3, imitate each other. If the imitation was not successful, the androids would recall the previous pose and perform the closest imitation they could remember. The poses are not remembered exactly. A slightly different pose is performed, which is then remembered again. In the process of repeating this, Alters' memory are updated and new behaviours appear that it has never seen before. By imitating them again, the behavioural patterns will become more diverse.

By interacting with people, Alter can gain a diversity of behaviour that they cannot gain by interacting with other alters. In order to eliminate the difference in physicality between humans and robots, we made the alters possess humans. The possessed alter was able to elicit more complex movements from their partners. By being raised by others, alters grow up like human children. Like a human child.

References:
1. Otto E Rossler, Lisa-Ruth Vial, Frank Kuske, August Nitschke, Takashi Ikegami and Andrei Ujica. Brain Equation and Personogenesis. Clinics in Pediatrics, vol.2 2019, pp.1-11.

2. Atsushi Masumori,Norihiro Maruyama and Takashi Ikegami. Personogenesis through Imitating Human Behaviors in a Humanoid Robot "Alter3" Frontiers in Robotics and AI7 p.165. 2020.

3. Takashi Ikegami, Can Mutual Imitation Generate Open-Ended Evolution? in the proceedings of ALIFE 2021 (Praha, 2021, Czech Republic).