The Science of Human-Robot Interaction

Researchers in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) are celebrating the transition to an official ACM Transactions journal. It is a significant achievement for HRI. This field has faced many challenges, including scarce resources for conducting HRI research, the difficulty of conducting the research itself—integrating hardware and software; building robots that can interact with people; piecing together the intricacies of seeing, thinking, and acting when a person encounters a robot; understanding and shaping ethical norms and standards; and stepping behind the mythologies that have long governed cultural attitudes for and against robots. HRI are presented here. Even as HRI becomes more mature, the core disciplines of the field face many controversies and subtleties that complicate our research questions and activities. Here’s an example: It was long thought that human beings can discriminate only the seven so-called universal emotions of surprise, happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and contempt in others’ faces and, therefore, that modeling this ability in a robot would be soon possible. But now, psychologists have reported that people can make much finer-grained emotional distinctions, raising the bar for designing a robot. Advances in technology, machine learning, and data science also present higher standards for what a robot can do with, and for, people.