Companions, Virtual Butlers, Assistive Robots: Empirical and Theoretical Insights for Building Long-Term Social Relationships.

Abstract

Robots and agents are becoming increasingly prominent in everyday life, e.g. as companions, user interfaces to smart homes, household robots, or for lifestyle reassurance. In these roles, they have to interact with their users in a complex social world, and must build and maintain long-term relationships with them. A symposium at EMCSR 2010 dealt with theoretical and empirical research on long-term relationships of humans with humans, animals, and machines that show complex interactive behaviours, and with methodologies to create knowledge about interaction with companions, virtual butlers and assistive robots. This technical report brings together the five papers presented at this symposium.