Abstract
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is the interdisciplinary study of interaction dynamics between humans and robots. Researchers and practitioners specializing in HRI come from a variety of fields, including engineering (electrical, mechanical, industrial, and design), computer science (human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language understanding, and computer vision), social sciences (psychology, cognitive science, communications, anthropology, and human factors), and humanities (ethics and philosophy).
Robots are poised to fill a growing number of roles in today’s society, from factory automation to service applications to medical care and entertainment. While robots were initially used in repetitive tasks where all human direction is given a priori, they are becoming involved in increasingly more complex and less structured tasks and activities, including interaction with people required to complete those tasks. This complexity has prompted the entirely new endeavor of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), the study of how humans interact with robots, and how best to design and implement robot systems capable of accomplishing interactive tasks in human environments. The fundamental goal of HRI is to develop the principles and algorithms for robot systems that make them capable of direct, safe and effective interaction with humans. Many facets of HRI research relate to and draw from insights and principles from psychology, communication, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, making HRI an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor. Human–robot interaction has been a topic of both science fiction and academic speculation even before any robots existed. Because much of active HRI development depends on natural-language processing, many aspects of HRI are continuations of human communications, a field of research which is much older than robotics. The origin of HRI as a discrete problem was stated by 20th century author Isaac Asimov in 1941, in his novel I, Robot. He states the Three Laws of Robotics as: