Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction: Communicating and Collaborating with Robotic Agents

Introduction For the last few years, our lab has been attempting to build robots that are similar to humans in a variety of ways. Our goal has been to build systems that think and act like a person rather than look like a person since the state of the art is not sufficient for a robot to look (even superficially) like a human person. We believe that there are at least two reasons to build robots that think and act like a human. First, how an artificial system acts has a profound effect on how people act toward the system. Second, how an artificial system thinks has a profound effect on how people interact with the system.