Talking on the Moon.

Abstract

How effective, efficient and natural human-robot inter-action can be depends for an important part on how meaning can be shared and construed between a human and a robot. The paper presents an initial investigation in the architectural functions that appear to underly em-bodied, situated understanding in joint action and in-teraction. The identified functions are combined into a concept system architecture. By interpreting these func-tions as requirements, the paper investigates dimensions for organizing groups of design decisions that affect how these requirements can be met in a concrete archi-tecture. As a result, a space of architectural niches (con-glomerations of functional requirements) arises, which each have different effects the possible deployment(s) of the robot. Reflecting on this given some salient as-pects of the current state-of-the-art in HRI and cognitive systems, the paper raises open challenges for building robots for collaborative space exploration. (This paper presents work in progress.)