Construction of social relationships between user and robot

Abstract The relationship between human users and their assistive robots is fundamentally social. This paper describes a novel design approach that deals explicitly with the social aspects of human–robot communication. This concept is heavily influenced by the theory of Social Responses to Communication Technologies (SRCT) and psychological research at Stanford University and elsewhere showing the power of teams in complex command, design and learning scenarios. We have built two personalities into our system; each is expected to maintain a personal relationship with the user, in this case people with severe physical disabilities and the therapists responsible for their rehabilitation. Functioning as a team, these computer-embedded personalities work with the user’s own persona to help manage and make useful the special capabilities of our robot. The graphical user interface, embodying Jiminey, the smart consultant/coach, and Pinocchio, the down-to-earth arm itself, is designed to allow the operators to create, modify and execute manipulation tasks using a small desktop robot system called ProVAR. Follow-on clinical studies will be conducted to validate the ProVAR dual-character concept.

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