Software Architecture for Social Robots

People are striving for easy, natural interfaces. Robotic user interfaces aim at providing this kind of interface by using human like interaction modalities. However, many applications fail, not because of fundamental problems of addressing social interaction but due to an unbalanced design. In this paper we derive a balancing framework for designing robotic user interfaces that balances four key dimensions: user, application, interface and technology. We investigate applicability of the framework by means of two experiments. The first experiment demonstrates that violations to the balancing framework can negate the efforts to improve an interface with natural interaction modalities. In the second experiment we present a real world application that adheres to the balancing concepts. Our results show that a balanced design is a key factor for the success or failure of a given robotic interface.