Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Some people regard the personal mobile robot as a candidate for the next digital revolution as it might become a future ubiquitous tool and everyday partner of humans. This new “socio-emotional” robot is supposed to conduct dialogue, to develop social competencies and to support users in everyday life. In this chapter, I sketch out the epistemological, ontological and techno-material groundings of personal service robotics which is based on new models of human-machine interaction like caregiver-infant or pet-owner. I discuss the conversational paradigm in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with its problematic concepts of “pre-given” social mechanisms, uninformed users as well as its new understanding of sociality as service.