Abel: Integrating Humanoid Body, Emotions, and Time Perception to Investigate Social Interaction and Human Cognition
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper has been improved. It can be published as the report from the ongoing work which is in stream of contemporary robotics.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your appreciation, if the paper has improved it is mainly due to the detailed comments and valuable suggestions that we have received from you and the other reviewers.
Kind regards,
The authors
Reviewer 2 Report
Thanks for your response. I have two questions.
(1) The modifications are not highlighted so that I cannot find where the manuscript has been improved.
(2) Simulations or experiments can indeed improve this paper if you can provide them.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thanks to you for your valuable comments, we think the paper has been improved by following your suggestions and the other reviewers’ comments.
To answer your questions:
(1) We apologize for this; we send in attachment a pdf of the latest version of the manuscript highlighting the parts that have been modified. We also added comments to describe these modifications.
(2) Due to the importance of the physical presence of the robot and its corporeity, which has been discussed in the presented manuscript, HRI experiments involving Abel in a real-world scenario are on the top of our Agenda. However, this sanitary situation has delayed the possibility to conduct such kind of experiments. In these programmed experiments, Abel will be used as a testbed where to implement the discussed methods and further investigate the advantages of emotion, body, and time integration in a social robot. We do believe that this publication, in the context of the Social Robotics special issue on “Theory, Methods, and Applications”, can be important as a reference for us and other social roboticists.
Kind regards,
The authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review of ” Humanoid Body, Emotion and Time: key perspectives for Abel and the next generation of Social Robots”
The paper has severe expositional and conceptual flaws, as detailed in the comments below. (The most striking expositional flaw is the continuous use of sexist language (‘man’ instead of ‘human’, use of the ‘he’ pronoun where plural and ‘they’ is the correct way to proceed. This is not only a question of ‘political correctness’, but a matter of empirical correctness: in the field of social robotics many lead researchers are female.) As to the conceptual flaws, the authors engage literature from cognitive science, biology, and philosophy, without, however, having acquired sufficient understanding of these terms, or so the text suggests, which is in many confused and careless. But these shortcoming could be fixed.
I recommend rejecting the paper, however, since the entire argument structure is highly implausible: the authors present superficially digested texts and theories that predominantly are not at the state of the art (published before 2015) and then proceed to argue from these how humanoid robots “must” be build (passim through the paper), issuing direct and strong recommendations that are apparently entirely uninformed by the research discussion in HRI and robophilophy, where during the past decade the question of whether robots, in order to be social agents, NEED to imitate human body language and emotion expression and recognition has been a well-researched issue, with rich body of contextually differentiated empirical results . Moreover, the authors are entirely oblivious, it appears, of current new method paradigms in social robotics to develop “value-driven” applications, in an effort to arrive at “responsible” or “culturally sustainable applications”. The entire ethical dimension (which is not a safety issue!) that arises when we build humanoid robots is left out. Here the authors are about 5 years behind the state of the art in humanoid robotics, where the ethical dimension has been recognized as an intrinsic element of synthetic research in this area (the author may take a look at the IEEE “Global Initiative for Ethical Alignment of Digital and Autonomous Systems”). Both in the Introduction and in the Conclusion the authors directly link the practical goals and the theoretical goals of research in humanoid robots, and this is precisely why current new paradigms for responsible robotics are currently being investigated and new IEEE standards are being developed. If the authors wish to discuss humanoid robots *only* as a research tool for understanding humans, then this should be explicitly stated in the introduction and conclusions, together with reasons for why they believe this can be done without running the risk of creating products for the (still unregulated) robotics market that may be genuinely harmful (the chance that the authors will be able to present convincing reasons are dim).
A final reason for rejecting the paper is that the only novel suggestion, the claim that humanoid robots should be build with special attention to the factor of time in human experience and practice, is not sufficiently well worked out her. As detailed in the comments below, a basic distinction between phenomenal and subjective time is missing; moreover, the authors seem oblivious to the deep methodological problems in using experimental neuroscience research and behavioral psychological research to access phenomenal qualities (which are those that really matter in the dynamics of emotions) and not only subjective assessments of temporal extensions.
Specific comments:
Line 25: “Thanks to the incredible technological advances of the last decades, humanoids robots have
26 assisted humankind in various capacities and demonstrated to be safe both in their application to
27 factory and home” --- seems like an overly boastful statement: assisted ’humankind’? Better talk about useful applications being increasingly developed and employed. The reference from 1996 does not make sense here, since humanoid robots are only more fully employed during the past 2 decades.
37 osservable>> observable
Line 64: ”and the theory had not slowed down..”— Mori’s UV is a hypothesis, not a theory, and the tempus is wrong: yet Mori’s hypothesis did not slow down…’.
Line 66: “man has continued to pursue his innate tendency to imitate nature and transfer knowledge from biology to the machine”—please avoid sexist language of this kind; to use the term ‘man’ and the pronoun ‘his’ here is an insult to the work of female researchers in the area. In the 21st century glitches of this kind are simply unforgivable, even when the authors are not native speakers.
Line 70: “A satisfactory review of anthropomorphism and human-likeness
71 in the design of robots and human-robot interaction is reported in [29],”—the authors confound anthropomorphicness and anthropomorphism (a common mistake among social roboticists). Anthropomorphism is defined as the human tendency to ascribe human features to non-human items, while anthropomorphicness = humanlikeness refers to the shape of an object.
Line 78: the confusion is exacerbated when expressions such as “anthropomorphise a robot” are used to refer to the designer’s /roboticists effort to create humanlke = anthropomorphic features. But the verb “anthropomorphizing” is used *predominantly* in the sense of the psychological term ‘anthropomorphism’ as I defined it in the previous comment: it is the *user’s* tendency to ascribe certain features to the robot.
Line 79: “affordance, defined by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson as
80 the implicit understanding of how to interact with an object depending on its shape and design”—this is NOT how Gibson defines an affordance, which is a feature of an environment, check the text. Again, a serious misunderstanding of revelant concepts.
Line 83, 84: typos
86: “behavior similar to that of man”—sexist language; note that there are many female humanoid robots, even among the pictures supplied in the paper
86 ff: “It follows that in order to obtain an agent with intelligence
87 and behavior similar to that of man, it is necessary that he possesses an equally similar body, with
88 instruments of perception of and action towards the external world that are equally human-like”—this sentence goes precisely against the definitions and spirit of the concepts they engage: embodied cognition is in no way committed to a functionalist paradigm of the mind or emotions, it merely says that mental faculties are intrinsically tied to interactions with the environment. Whether a robot could ever have “instruments of perception and action” that are humanlike in a more than non-functional sense, is a highly controversial issue and cannot be introduced here as a simple conclusion.
Line 114: “As a consequence, the body of a robot should not be considered just as a mechatronic structure
115 equipped with sensors and actuators controlled by a cognitive system, but also as the specific interface
116 that allows the robot to internalise the information on which to build any abstraction, reasoning and
117 feeling of what happens.” This conclusion is drawn on the basis of the work of one roboticist (Parisi), mainly working from a paper from 2004. Since many roboticists currently work with ML for processing perceptual information and the learning of agentive routines-in-context, i.e., with non-representational architectures, the author’s conclusion does not seem well-grounded in the current state of the art.
129: typo
172: typo
184: typo;
170-184: the authors use the notion of ‘time’ as if it were a unified concept. But ‘time’ covers a whole spectrum of notions. In particular, the authors do not seem to be aware of the difference between phenomenal time and subjective time. The research reported in this paragraph partly relates to phenomenal time (the perceived qualitative awareness of the relationship between futurity and pastness (note: these are not “prospective” and “retrospective” time) and partly to subjective time (subjective assessments of temporal extension). Pronouncements such as: “time perception
194 is also a fundamental element of human awareness. Our consciousness, our ability to perceive the
195 world around us and, ultimately, our very sense of self are shaped upon our perception of time in
196 loop connecting memories of the past, present sensations and expectations about the future” launch the authors squarely in the philosophical discussion about time but the fact that the notion of time is used without proper differentiations demonstrates that the most basic elements of this discussion are not sufficiently understood,
188: typo
211: why is Gustav Hoegen (here and below passim) referred to by his first name-? Does an artist not deserve the same respect as any other researcher cited in this paper?
218: typo, ungrammatical sentence
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper consists of two parts – the first part describes the state of the art on emotions and emotional robotics research, focusing on the body, the emotions and the time. The second part is devoted to the Abel robot. The state of the art emphacises the role of time in perception. It is an interesting overview, however it does not lead to a conclusion pointing out what knowledgeis missing and thus shouldbe the subject of the presented research. The second part is general. The details of the mechatronic system of the developed emotional robot are missing, despite that the photographs are provided (especially the right part of Fig.5 shows many details, but without any explanation). The framework of cognitive architecture (Fig.6) is taken from an older publication by the Authors, however the figure is poorely commented.
The Gustav’s method of mechanical design is nicely introduced, but weakely absorbed when presenting the basic features of Abel (for example the number of motors is given, but it is not justified why such a number of active DOF’s was choosen). The conclusions emphacise the importance of the intergration of mind and body, what is obviouus. The future plans are addressed in general terms.
The whole paper describes in part the state of the art and in part the general research plan. The original contribution and the relevance of each part is not obvious. The summary and conclusions do not explain what is the novelity of the presented considerations.
The submission for a journal publication is rather premature, however the material can constitute a solid conference paper.
A detailed remark:
,,robota’’ means just labor, not ,,forced labor’’ (referring to the play by K.Capek.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors present a well organized and written article of their work in the area of social robotics, specifically for the goal of next generation social robots that exhibit human like capabilities. This is an important area of work, and while others are and have done much in the area of robotics, this work is especially intriguing in its approach of 'learning by building’.
I do suggest a clean up wording here and there.
Minor editing:
- Line 37: osservable spelling may be observable
- Line 77: esamples spelling
- Line 332: belieavbility
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper presents three key perspectives for the next generation of social robots and the development of a new humanoid robot called Abel. The paper is interesting, well structured and well presented and has minor spelling mistakes.
- However, the paper is missing a critical review of the current humanoid robots. There are a lot of examples in Fig.1 but they are not reviewed in detail.
- For every key perspective the degree of satisfaction of the current robot must be presented.
- The Abel robot should be presented in more details. The presented perspectives act as requirements for the development of Abel. Those requirements should be translated to engineering specifications and then to concepts. In what degree the current development of the Abel satisfies the key perspectives?
- Eliminate/ decrease the content of lines 200-217 to be more focused to the design and development of Abel (the expertise of the labs and scientists that contributes to a scientific paper is not needed).
- Hoegen’s method should be presented in more detail. Avoid using first name.
- Some minor mistakes should be eliminated (e.g. esamples line 75).
Reviewer 5 Report
This whole manuscript is more like a project report, not an academic paper. The authors provide a lot of introductions about their designed robot. However, no simulations or experiments are presented so that the readers cannot understand where the advantage or effectiveness is. So I suggest that the authors should add some experiments to convince the readers. In addition, the English writing should be improved.