PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Understanding others’ intentions and representing them as being able to understand intentions are relevant factors in cooperation, as is the ability to represent shared goals and coordinated action plans (joint intentions). To endow artificial systems with cooperative functionality, they need to be enabled to adopt the goals of another individual and act together with the other to achieve these goals. Such systems may be embodied as robotic agents or as humanoid agents projected in virtual reality (“embodied cooperative systems”). A central question is how the processes involved interact and how their interplay can be modeled. For example, inter-agent cooperation relies very much on common ground, i.e. the mutually shared knowledge of the interlocutors. Nonverbal behaviors such as gaze and gestures are important means of coordinating attention between interlocutors (joint attention) in the pursuit of goals. In the context of cooperative settings, the view that humans are users of a certain “tool” has shifted to that of a “partnership” with artificial agents, insofar they can be considered as being able to take initiative as autonomous entities. This chapter will outline these ideas taking the virtual humanoid agent “Max” as an example.