Exploring humanoid factors of robots through transparent and reflective interactions

Abstract

Humanoid robots that resemble human body, language and/or actions enable promising interactive agent behavior in people's life. The humanoid factor of being “like-a-human” implies that the interaction with a humanoid robot shares similarities with human-to-human communications. Designing a humanoid robot must take the users' perception of its social characteristics into consideration to achieve intuitive and smooth interaction. The addition of humanoid factors means that traditional HCI knowledge need to be revisited and revised as it is applied to humanoid robot design. This work compares and contrasts the interaction paradigms for humanoid robots to traditional computer-based systems. Opportunities and challenges brought by humanoid factors are explored and discussed within two complementary aspects of human-computer interaction: transparent interaction and reflective interaction. Given the diverse roles of robots that are probable in future daily life, the impacts of humanoid factors in human-robot collaboration are also investigated to identify methods to optimize the mutual understanding between a human user and the robot. Grounded in recent robot research, this paper aims to enhance the knowledge of humanoid factors utilization and elucidate the shifting of interaction paradigms from human-computer interaction to humanrobot interaction.