Interaction Studies with Social Robots

Over the past 10 years we have seen worldwide an immense growth of research and development into companion robots. Those are robots that fulfil particular tasks, but do so in a socially acceptable manner. The companionship aspect reflects the repeated and long-term nature of such interactions, and the potential of people to form relationships with such robots, e.g. as friendly assistants. A number of companion and assistant robots have been entering the market, two of the latest examples are Aldebaran's Pepper robot, or Jibo (Cynthia Breazeal). Companion robots are more and more targeting particular application areas, e.g. as home assistants or therapeutic tools. Research into companion robots needs to address many fundamental research problems concerning perception, cognition, action and learning, but regardless how sophisticated our robotic systems may be, the potential users need to be taken into account from the early stages of development. The talk will emphasize the need for a highly user-centred approach towards design, development and evaluation of companion robots. An important challenge is to evaluate robots in realistic and long-term scenarios, in order to capture as closely as possible those key aspects that will play a role when using such robots in the real world. In order to illustrate these points, my talk will give examples of interaction studies that my research team has been involved in. This includes studies into how people perceive robots' non-verbal cues, creating and evaluating realistic scenarios for home companion robots using narrative framing, and verbal and tactile interaction of children with the therapeutic and social robot Kaspar. The talk will highlight the issues we encountered when we proceeded from laboratory-based experiments and prototypes to real-world applications.