Minimal communication design of embodied interface

Robots have been envisaged as both workers and partners of humans from the earliest period of their history. Therefore, robots should become artificial entities that can potentially socially interact with human beings in social communities. Recent advances in technology have added various functions to robots: Development of actuators and grippers show us infinite possibilities for factory automation, and robots can now walk and perform very smoothly. All of these functions have been developed as solutions improving to robot movement and performance. However, there are many remaining problems in the communication between robots and humans. Communication robots provide one approach to realization of embodied interfaces. These unsolved problems involving communication can be clarified by adopting the concept of subtractive methods. In this paper, we consider the minimal design of robots from the viewpoint of designing communication. By minimal design, we mean eliminating the non-essential portions and keeping only the most fundamental functions. We expect that the simple and clean nature of minimally designed objects will allow humans to interact with these robots without becoming uninterested too quickly. Because humans have "a natural dislike for the absence of reasoning", artificial entities built according to minimal design principles have the ability to extract the human drive to relate with others. We propose a method of designing a robot that has "character" and is situated in a social context from the viewpoint of minimal design.