Abstract
As robots are entering our everyday lives, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how untrained people will interact with robots. Fortunately, untrained people already interact with a variety of robotic agents (withdrawing cash from ATMs, driving cars with anti-lock brakes) so we are not completely starting from scratch. In the moment of those interactions with robotic agents, people behave in ways that do not necessarily align with the rational belief that robots are just plain machines. Through a combination of controlled experiments and field studies, this talk will examine the ways that untrained people interact with robotic agents, including (1) how we interact with personal robots, and (2) how we interact through telepresence robots. Drawing from theories of human-computer interaction and this type of empirical research, we provide implications for both theory and the design of interactive robotic systems.