Towards a new paradigm of human-robot-computer interaction

The merging of two lines of research, human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction, can lead to a field of research that might be called human-robot-computer interaction. Human-robot-computer interaction is a research field for understanding how multiple humans, robots and computers interact with each other, and generating effective design methodologies for their interaction. Towards this end, the author launched a project called PRIME (Physically-grounded human-Robot-computer Interaction in Multiagent Environment). Its goal is to develop keen knowledge for understanding and designing human-robot-computer interaction, in which humans can naturally behave and cooperate with each other by using multiple robots and computers. The aim is to systematically integrate autonomous mobile robots into open and distributed computer networks and their interface systems so as to integrate the information world of computers with the physical world of humans and robots. It seems that this approach is conceptually new to people both in computer science and in robotics. The author presents some fundamental problems in human-robot-computer interaction, following a brief summary of related work. Next, some results obtained in PRIME project are described, followed by concluding remarks