C. Breazeal

Abstract

Newly emerging robotics applications for domestic or entertainment purposes are slowly introducing autonomous robots into society at large. A critical capability of such robots is their ability to interact with humans, and in particular, untrained users. This paper explores the hypothesis that people will intuitively interact with robots in a natural social manner provided the robot can perceive, interpret, and appropriately respond with familiar human social cues. Two experiments are presented where naive human subjects interact with an anthropomorphic robot. Evidence for mutual regulation and entrainment of the interaction is presented, and how this benefits the interaction as a whole is discussed.