ERICA: The ERATO Intelligent Conversational Android

The development of an android with convincingly lifelike appearance and behavior has been a long-standing goal in robotics, and recent years have seen great progress in many of the technologies needed to create such androids. However, it is necessary to actually integrate these technologies into a robot system in order to assess the progress that has been made towards this goal and to identify important areas for future work. To this end, we are developing ERICA, an autonomous android system capable of conversational interaction, featuring advanced sensing and speech synthesis technologies, and arguably the most humanlike android built to date. Although the project is ongoing, initial development of the basic android platform has been completed. In this paper we present an overview of the requirements and design of the platform, describe the development process of an interactive application, report on ERICA's first autonomous public demonstration, and discuss the main technical challenges that remain to be addressed in order to create humanlike, autonomous androids.