Robot's Delight: Japanese robots rap about their artificial intelligence

"Robot's Delight – A Lyrical Exposition on Learning by Imitation from Human-Human Interaction" is a video submission that won Best Video at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2017). The team also provides an in-depth explanation of the techniques and robotics in the video. Although social robots are growing in popularity and technical feasibility, it is still unclear how we can effectively program social behaviors. There are many difficulties in programming social robots -- we need to design hundreds or thousands of dialogue rules, anticipate situations the robot will face, handle common recognition errors, and program the robot to respond to many variations of human speech and behavior. Perhaps most challenging is that we often do not understand the reasoning behind our own behavior and so it is hard to program such implicit knowledge into robots.