Human-Robot Interaction

“Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a challenging research field at the intersection of psychology, cognitive science, the social sciences, artificial intelligence, computer science, robotics, engineering and human-computer interaction (Dautenhahn, 2007).” This broad field encompasses almost all situations where humans and robots are co-located and many methodologies and approaches are borrowed from other disciplines. The main goal of HRI is to endow robots with various competencies that will facilitate their interaction with humans. To drive the design of such skills, HRI studies humans in interaction with robots and attempts to make it more effective or intuitive. The relevance of HRI has increased as robots themselves become more common. When they were rare, a lack of effective interactions could be compensated for by increased user training. However, as robots are encountered by more people during everyday life, it has become more important that untrained users be able to effectively interact with and use these robots. As the focus in HRI is on the interaction of the human and the robot, work in HRI does not require a fully autonomous robot. Often, interactions are “mocked-up” by using a so-called ‘Wizard of Oz’ scenario, where a hidden researcher controls a robot to have a desired interaction with an unsuspecting human. Alternatively, experiments may involve prerecorded videos of humans and robots interacting that are shown to external observers. But, of course, if an actual autonomous robot exists, the direct interaction of it and lay users can be studied.