Creating Lively Behaviors in Social Robots.

In order to consider robots as social partners rather than mere machines, they have to be perceived as living entities. In this paper we present a system to improve the robot's liveliness based on the execution of non-repetitive, unpredictable, subtle actions that are running continuously during the operation of the robot. The so-called Liveliness System uses the existing interfaces, or communicative channels, and combines its actions with other systems working in the robot. The system has been successfully implemented in two social robots and the operation of the system has been showed during a competitive 2 player game played by a robot and a person.