The Robots are Coming! How to Get People and Robots to Interact With Each Other

Dr. Bill Smart, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University, St. Louis

As robotics becomes a mature science, we will begin to see more and more robots in our daily lives. This means that members of the general public will have to interact with them directly. These interactions may be in passing (where the robot is simply in the same physical space as the person), social (such as a robot waiter), or task-based (where the human is using the robot to complete a particular task). In all of these scenarios, there is a social interaction between the human and the robot. In order to make these interactions work, we must know what the expectations of both the human and the robot are, and must carefully design the software on the robot to respect these expectations.

In this talk, we will look at some of the fundamental questions in the new area of Human-Robot Interaction, talk about some of the technical issues involved, and speculate about where things will go in the next 50 years.