Understanding Humans by Building Androids

Hiroshi Ishiguro
Osaka University


Abstract

In the near future, we are going to use interactive humanoids in our daily life. They will provide various services by using the communication functions. In order to realize the robot society, we have to investigate many issues. The ideal humanoid is a human since the human brain has functions to recognize humans. This means that we need to study humans for building more humanlike robots. Once we get deeply into this fundamental question, the many issues come up, such as humanlike appearance, humanlike movement, and so on.

This talk introduces a series of androids that have been developed for tackling the issues and the research topics. Although it is difficult to solve completely the issues, they brings us new ideas on what human is. In other words, this research approach bridges robotics and not only cognitive science and neuroscience but also philosophy.