Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

The widespread adoption of personal service robots will likely depend on how well they interact with users. This chapter was motivated by a desire to facilitate the design of usable personal service robots. Toward that end, this chapter reviews the literature concerning people interacting with personal service robots. First, ongoing research related to the design of personal service robots is discussed. This material is organized around generic activities that would take place when a user initiates interaction with a future personal service robot, for example, understanding the robot's affordances or its cognitive capabilities, as well as when a personal service robot initiates interaction with a user, for example, understanding the user's intent or engaging and communicating with the user. Second, research areas that deserve more attention from the human-robot interaction community are discussed, for example, understanding when people do and do not treat robots as if they were people. Throughout the chapter, recommendations for the design of future personal service robots are offered along with recommendations for future research. S imple robots that perform a household chore or entertain are becoming commonplace, and more sophisticated versions of those robots are just on the horizon. Such sophistication, however, could translate into difficulty interacting with those robots. To avoid that difficulty, designers must be concerned about human-robot interaction. Toward that end, this chapter reviews the literature concerning how robots that perform chores or entertain should interact with people. THE DIvERSIfIcATIon of commERcIAl RoboTS The United Nations categorizes commercial robots as industrial robots, professional service robots, or personal service robots (United Nations, 2008). An industrial robot is an "automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes" (International Organization for Standardization, 1994). For example, the first industrial robot, known as the Unimate, was a large programmable arm that handled and stacked hot pieces of die-cast metal at a General Motors plant. Unlike industrial robots, professional service robots and personal service robots do not have standardized definitions. For the most part, they are differentiated from one another on the basis

Toward understanding social cues and signals in human–robot interaction: effects of robot gaze and proxemic behavior

“…The infusion of robots into society has expanded from industrialized environments to increasingly complex operations and even personal service contexts (Jones and Schmidlin, 2011). Robots are now engaged in human–robot interaction (HRI), not just in industrialized settings, but also in healthcare (e.g., Mutlu and Forlizzi, 2008), education (e.g., Saerbeck et al, 2010), therapeutic contexts (e.g., Ferrari et al, 2009; Robins et al, 2009), and in military (e.g., Yamauchi, 2004) and civil service operations (e.g., Murphy, 2004).…”

Review of Interfaces for Industrial Human-Robot Interaction

“…A range of other approaches exist, for example, guidance of an electric wheelchair using head movements [2]. Jones & Schmidlin conducted a thorough review of HRI for personal service robots to facilitate the design of usable personal service robots [30].…”

Human Strategies for Multitasking, Search, and Control Improved via Real-Time Memory Aid for Gaze Location

“…In robot interaction, most real-time eye interfaces have been designed to mimic gaze for social or communicative reasons (Staudte and Crocker, 2008Jones and Schmidlin, 2011;Boucher et al, 2012;Kohlbecher et al, 2012). Only few human-robot studies took gaze location into consideration for improving human task performance (DeJong et al, 2011), which involved improving human performance in spatial transformations using robotic arms.…”