Organic Human-Robot Interactions: Psychological Aspects to Help Social Robots Become Sociable

Abstract

This paper presents a psychologically inspired engineering approach about optimal robot behaviour in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The main contribution of this paper is to introduce the concept of Organic Human-Robot Interactions (O-HRI). First we build up a basic formula for behaviour that can serve as a ground for robot behaviour. Then we introduce some crucial psychological aspects to robot behaviour, namely mistakes and miscalculations, imperfections and intentions in behaviour. The paper argues that mere advancement of certain social skills in social robots are not enough to make them more sociable or socially desirable. Therefore psychological, ethological and evolutionary backgrounds of social behaviours are discussed as fundamental baselines for our proposed concept of Organic Human-Robot Interaction. Finally we suggest some practical guidelines to consider when building up the behavioural paradigms of social robots.