'Food' for Human Robot Interaction

Abstract

'Food', when mentioned in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research, is most often in the context of functional applications of automation, delivery, and assistance. Food has, however, not been explored as a medium for social expression or building relationships with social robots. Using web-based examples of robot food and our pilot collection of LOVOT and AIBO robot user's Tweets about their practices of feeding their robots, we show how food has the potential to sustain interactions, increase enjoyment, sociability and companionship in HRI, enhance life-likeness, autonomy, and agency for robots, and open up opportunities for community building among robot users. We present design implications of food for HRI, and urge HRI researchers to envision food as a facet of Human-Robot relationships and <--Human-Food-Robot--> interaction as a celebratory, provocative, and promising domain for HRI and social robot design.