Socializing co-robots: Incorporating users and situated interaction in the design of collaborative robots

This paper seeks to address emerging concerns related to co-robotic technologies by exploring conceptual and practical approaches for explicitly including “the social” as the basis for developing and evaluating robots. In this talk, four recent projects performed within the scope of the R-House human-robot interaction lab ((http://rhouse.soic.indiana.edu)) is described. Three of the studies took place outside the laboratory - in users´ homes, a local nursing institution, and an office - and involve culturally and socially situated studies of user perceptions of and interactions with robots to inform robot development. The fourth example describes the development of socially aware robotic agents using long time series of low resolution data (e.g. mechanical vibration, temperature, lighting, collisions) and bio-inspired computational methods to identify human presence and activities.