From the Restless COG to the Yawning Robot: Humanoid Robotics as a Model-Based Science

Robots have been often used as models to theorise on the behaviour and cognition of living systems. Quite recently, a novel approach using robots for epistemic purposes has emerged. In what is called here interactive humanoid robotics, humanoid robots are not used as simulations of human beings (as in classical cybernetics and biorobotics), but as tools to provide predictable, manipulable, and controllable “social stimuli” to humans—i.e., as tools to stimulate, rather than simulate, living systems. By analysing how humans react to the stimuli delivered by humanoid robots in various conditions and having various characteristics, one obtains empirical evidence to theorise about the dynamics of human-human interaction. The structure and validity of this experimental approach has received little attention by philosophers of science so far. This article aims at paving the way for a methodological analysis of it, by (1) circumscribing the class of research questions that can be sensibly addressed using interactive humanoid robots, (2) outlining the structure of the experimental procedures adopted in the field, and (3) reflecting about the validity of the approach, with a particular focus on the impact of biomimicry and of the (folk-psychological) theories that humans, perhaps implicitly, formulate and use during interaction with humanoid robots.