Abstract
Understanding the behavioral dynamics that underline human-robot interactions in groups remains one of the core challenges in social robotics research. However, despite a growing interest in this topic, there is still a lack of established and validated measures that allow researchers to analyze human-robot interactions in group scenarios; and very few that have been developed and tested specifically for research conducted in-the-wild. This is a problem because it hinders the development of general models of human-robot interaction, and makes the comprehension of the inner workings of the relational dynamics between humans and robots, in group contexts, significantly more difficult. In this paper, we aim to provide a reflection on the current state of research on human-robot interaction in small groups, as well as to outline directions for future research with an emphasis on methodological and transversal issues.
Highlights
If you look at the field of robotics today, you can say robots have been in the deepest oceans, they’ve been to Mars, you know? They’ve been all these places, but they’re just starting to come into your living room
Following the recognition of their importance, researchers in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and social robotics have been increasingly concerned about understanding the behavioral dynamics of groups of humans and robots, as reflected by the growth of published academic research on this topic in the last two decades
The study of group interactions has been roughly organized into six categories: (a) composition, (b) structure, (c) performance, (d) conflict, (e) the ecology of groups, and (f) intergroup relationships [23,24,25,26]
Summary
If you look at the field of robotics today, you can say robots have been in the deepest oceans, they’ve been to Mars, you know? They’ve been all these places, but they’re just starting to come into your living room. The definition of a group will be explored in-depth, for the purpose of this article, we will consider group HRI to be any type of interaction between at least three group members who share a significant goal and that exert some type or degree of mutual influence over one another [10] (e.g., complete a task, play a game) These group members can include one or more social robots and/or one or more persons, and are not limited by the context they operate in (e.g., schools, museums, shopping malls). We seek to focus on the specific methods, methodologies and transversal issues that underline that research by taking a critical look at published research and outlining paths for future improvement
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