A robot centric perspective on the HRI paradigm

The industrial revolution undoubtedly defined the role of machines in our society, and it directly shaped the paradigm for human machine interaction - a paradigm which was inherited by the field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) as the machines became robots. This paper argues that, for a foreseeable set of interactions, reshaping this paradigm would result in more effective and more often successful interactions. This paper presents our Robot Centric paradigm for HRI. Evidence in the form of summaries of relevant literature and our past efforts in developing social-robotics enabling technology is presented to support our paradigm. A definition and a set of recommendations for designing the key enabling component, sociocontextual cues, of our paradigm are presented. Finally, empirical evidence generated through a number of experiments and field studies (N = 456 and N = 320) demonstrates our paradigm is both feasibly incorporated into HRI and moreover, yields significant contributions to the successfulness of a set of HRIs.