Reading a robot’s mind: A model of utterance understanding based on the theory of mind mechanism

The purpose of this paper is to construct a methodology for smooth communications between humans and robots. Here, focus is on a mindread-ing mechanism, which is indispensable in human-human communications. We propose a model of utterance understanding based on this mech-anism. Concretely speaking, we apply the model of a mindreading system (Baron-Cohen 1996) to a model of human-robot communications. More-over, we implement a robot interface system that applies our proposed model. Psychological exper-iments were carried out to explore the validity of the following hypothesis: by reading a robot’s mind, a human can estimate the robot’s intention with ease, and, moreover, the person can even un-derstand the robot’s unclear utterances made by synthesized speech sounds. The results of the ex-periments statistically supported our hypothesis