In the emerging field of personal robotics, the path to widespread adoption faces significant challenges. While personal robots offer immense potential for assisting individuals in both domestic and public environments, their success depends on effective human-robot interaction (HRI). Central to this interaction is the need for personalised communication styles tailored to individual user preferences and needs.
By focusing on the development of personalised and acceptable robot perception and interaction capabilities, PERSEO aims to bridge the critical gap between technology and user experience.
Image from [1]
It is therefore important to address questions such as
- What communication style should social robots adopt?
- Should they always adopt the same communication style or should they continuously adapt to the context?
While for humans these questions are deeply rooted in cultures and habits, for robots we need to explicitly state and define their behaviours. Moreover, as pointed out in [2], we humans communicate implicitly in an interaction and learn the nuances from how the other person responds to us.
On the robot side, we should emphasise the transparency of the intended robot behaviours and how relevant the topic is in terms of robot responsibility for long-term interaction [3].
This short post aims to draw attention to how behaviour should be designed to optimise the quality of human-robot interaction in the future.
If you would like to engage with the community and contribute to the definition of personalisation policies for social robots, make sure to interact with us during the second edition of our WARN workshop.
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[1] Fracasso, Francesca, et al. “Social robots acceptance and marketability in italy and germany: a cross-national study focusing on assisted living for older adults.” International Journal of Social Robotics 14.6 (2022): 1463-1480.
[2] Giardini, Francesca, and Cristiano Castelfranchi. “Behavioral implicit communication for human-robot interaction.” The Intersection of Cognitive Science and Robotics: From Interfaces to Intelligence-Papers from the 2004 AAAI Fall Symposium, Technical Report, FS-04. Vol. 5. 2004.
[3] Gogoshin, Dane Leigh. “Robot responsibility and moral community.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 8 (2021): 768092.