SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT WITH ROBOTS AND AGENTS: INTRODUCTION

Engaging people in interactions with robots and agents is easy: it has been shown repeatedly that users respond socially to them. Keeping people engaged over a longer period of time is much more difficult—but this is exactly what companions or socially assistive robots should be able to do. The concept ‘‘companion’’ has become an umbrella concept for a loosely defined collection of virtual (agent) or embodied (robotic) artifacts mainly for household and personal use (cf. Wilks 2010). They can be tutors, coaches and assistants in different domains, entertainers, and simply ‘‘company.’’ Experiments so far have considered scenarios such as weight loss and fitness training (Kidd 2008; Bickmore et al. 2005; Bickmore and Picard 2005), and pet substitute (like Paro). In the framework of ‘‘Ambient Assisted Living,’’ companions could play a role in organized home management, facilitation of social networking, and health monitoring, through to the physical tasks executed by mobile ‘‘social assistive robots’’ (SAR) (Feil-Seifer and Mataric 2005). Ideally, a companion should serve most or all of these functions in one application as a multitalented ‘‘virtual butler’’ (cf. Trappl 2011). The idea is that people keep their companion with them for years, that it blends seamlessly into their everyday life, adapts to its user by learning and even manages to follow the user’s changes in lifestyle, well-being, activities, and contacts. First of all, interaction with it has to be rich and variable enough to keep the user interested over a long period of time. But this is only the first of several challenges.