Designing Robots for Long-Term Social Interaction - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Designing Robots for Long-Term Social Interaction

Rachel Kirby, Frank Broz, Jodi Forlizzi, Marek Piotr Michalowski, Anne Mundell, Stephanie Rosenthal, Brennan Peter Sellner, Reid Simmons, Kevin Snipes, Alan Schultz, and Jue Wang
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 2199 - 2204, August, 2005

Abstract

Valerie the Roboceptionist is the most recent addition to Carnegie Mellon's Social Robots Project. A permanent installation in the entranceway to Newell-Simon Hall, the robot combines useful functionality---giving directions, looking up weather forecasts, etc.---with an interesting and compelling character. We are using Valerie to investigate human-robot social interaction, especially long-term human-robot "relationships." Over a nine-month period, we have found that many visitors continue to interact with the robot on a daily basis, but that few of the individual interactions last for more than 30 seconds. Our analysis of the data has indicated several design decisions that should facilitate more natural human-robot interaction.

BibTeX

@conference{Kirby-2005-9260,
author = {Rachel Kirby and Frank Broz and Jodi Forlizzi and Marek Piotr Michalowski and Anne Mundell and Stephanie Rosenthal and Brennan Peter Sellner and Reid Simmons and Kevin Snipes and Alan Schultz and Jue Wang},
title = {Designing Robots for Long-Term Social Interaction},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2005},
month = {August},
pages = {2199 - 2204},
publisher = {IEEE},
keywords = {robotics, social robots, human-robot interaction},
}