Measuring Human-Robots Interactions

Social Robotics is an interdisciplinary playground where researchers from sociology, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics meet to design one kind of future robot: the social robot. This challenge is simple to describe, but complex to achieve. The social robot can be a classical robot or a machine with sufficient resources and capabilities to receive and exchange information with humans, with the ultimate result of helping people in daily-life activities. Exchanges should be intuitive and easy: these two key characteristics strongly define the sociability of artificial agents. The system formed by a human and a social robot is hybrid by nature. How should we consider its communication and interactions as compared with a human-human system? Humans use all available sensory and motoric modalities to communicate and establish social relations. Human-human interaction has a vast literature base that continues to be expanded by communication scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists among others. In humanrobot systems, however, the inherent asymmetries prevent researchers from directly borrowing classical human-human approaches. However, one can be inspired by these efforts when developing tools and techniques that observe and evaluate human-robot interaction (HRI). The fundamental question is whether the same, or similar, mechanisms that drive human-human interaction also drive human-robot interactions. Although the controllable, measurable, and observable nature of robots provides researchers with a potentially infinite set of experimental conditions, the field of HRI is nevertheless constrained by a shortage of objective measurement