Design and Evaluation of Sociable Robot Systems

Human-robot interaction is now understood well enough to allow us to build useful systems that can function outside of the laboratory. In my work, I propose the concept of a sociable robot system, which consists of a robot as a user interface to a complex system. There are three parts to this work: the definition of a sociable robot system and the background work that contributes to it (sections 1 and 3), the methods for evaluating such a system based on methodology from related fields (section 5), and an example implementation with its attendant design and evaluation (sections 6 through 8).