We want to build robots capable of rich social interactions with humans, including natural communication and cooperation. This work explores how imitation as a social learning and teaching process may be applied to building socially intelligent robots, and summarizes our progress toward building a robot capable of learning how to imitate facial expressions from simple imitative games played with a human, using biologically inspired mechanisms. Our approach is heavily influenced by the ways human infants learn to communicate with their caregivers and understand the actions of others in intentional terms. Among the key ideas that we draw from work on the development of human social intelligence, the most crucial is the hypothesis that in human infants, imitative interactions, starting with facial mimicry, are a significant stepping-stone in developing appropriate social behavior, learning to predict other's actions, and ultimately, understanding the intensions of others.

This paper presents an overview of our work towards building socially intelligent, cooperative humanoid robots that can work and learn in partnership with people. People understand each other in social terms, allowing them to engage others in a variety of complex social interactions including communication, social learning, and cooperation. We present our theoretical framework that is a novel combination of Joint Intention Theory and Situated Learning Theory and demonstrate how this framework can be applied to develop our sociable humanoid robot, Leonardo. We demonstrate the robot's ability to learn quickly and effectively from natural human instruction using gesture and dialog, and then cooperate to perform a learned task jointly with a person. Such issues must be addressed to enable many new and exciting applications for robots that require them to play a long-term role in people's daily lives.

Future applications for personal robots motivate research into developing robots that are intelligent in their interactions with people. Toward this goal, in this paper we present an integrated socio-cognitive architecture to endow an anthropomorphic robot with the ability to infer mental states such as beliefs, intents, and desires from the observable behavior of its human partner. The design of our architecture is informed by recent findings from neuroscience and embodies cognition that reveals how living systems leverage their physical and cognitive embodiment through simulation-theoretic mechanisms to infer the mental states of others. We assess the robot's mindreading skills on a suite of benchmark tasks where the robot interacts with a human partner in a cooperative scenario and a learning scenario. In addition, we have conducted human subjects experiments using the same task scenarios to assess human performance on these tasks and to compare the robot's performance with that of people. In the process, our human subject studies also reveal some interesting insights into human behavior.

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