Human-Robot Interaction: Recent Experiments and Future Work

Human-robot interaction is a recently emerged area of research that is working to understand how to build robots that are better at successfully navigating social interactions with people. Recent work has shown that people respond differently to robots than to animated characters, that the physical embodiment of a robot is important in an interaction, and that social behavior on the part of a robot helps in conducting interactions. Several future uses of sociable robots are considered, along with the challenges that must be overcome in the process of creating these robots. Introduction Human-robot interaction is a recently emerged area of research that is working to understand how to build robots that are better at successfully navigating social interactions with people. This paper presents an overview of the field and a review of recent work of the author in three parts. The first part introduces the reader to the topics of human-robot interaction and sociable robotics. This is followed by a discussion of current applications of interactive robotic technologies. The second portion of the paper presents recent work by the author in the field of human-robot interaction. The final section presents a series of ideas on future applications of socially interactive robots. What is Human-Robot Interaction? The field of human-robot interaction is still a new area of research, although there are a growing number of people interested in this topic. HRI stems from several existing fields of inquiry, primarily human-computer interaction, robotics, and artificial intelligence. It also draws on, albeit to a lesser extent, other areas of work such as psychology, embodied conversational agents (animated agents), and communications theory. The work presented in this paper will acknowledge work in several of these areas and it is becoming easier to find research that ties together these and other fields of investigation. Although human-robot interaction is a new field, researchers are addressing a number of interesting questions and have identified many more issues that need to be answered. A short list of some of the interesting questions explored in my and others’ work include: What social skills must a robot be capable of and how do these make a difference to a human with whom the robot is interacting? •