Interactive Humanoids and Androids

We, humans, anthropomorphize targets of communication. In this sense, humanoids or androids can have ideal interface for humans. This paper focuses on two new fundamental issues in the human interface studies. There are two relationships between robots and humans: one is inter-personal and the other is social. In the inter-personal relationships, the appearance of the robot is a new and important research issues. In the social relationships, a function to recognize human relationships through interaction is needed for robots of the next generation. These two issues explore new possibilities of androids and humanoids. Especially, the appearance problem bridges between science and engineering. The approach from robotics tries to build very humanlike robots based on knowledge from cognitive science. The approach from cognitive science uses the robot for verifying hypotheses for understanding humans. We call this cross-interdisciplinary framework android science