Codifying Wildness: Wild Behaviour for Improving Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Animals, even when domesticated, maintain a series of innate characteristics that humans perceive as wild. Human responses to animal behavior vary with many factors such as historical time and culture. Even after their domestication, humans perceive animals’ distinctive behavior patterns that are considered as being wild, even in pets. It is common understanding that these wild patterns are linked to the specific animal species but also that there is a common characteristic to wild behavior in general. In this paper, we present our work on coding such a quality, exemplified in an application to robot pets. We consider that an application of wild character in the behavior of the pet robot can improve its realism and make the human/robot social interaction more captivating. To this aim, we have designed and implemented a behavioral architecture to reproduce well-known behavioral patterns of domestic cats that might be considered wild and applied it to a commercial pet robot that then was used to assess human reaction to its behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with experiments carried out with humans that found the robot cat “independent” and “unpredictable” to a significant degree, two distinctive features of the wild side of animals.