Socially Embodied Human-Robot Interaction: Addressing Human Emotions with Theories of Embodied Cognition

Introduction

The ability to engage in social interaction is a crucial building block of human culture, which is one of the major driving forces for the complexity of social life and cognition. Consequently, humans have become as experts at interacting socially, and if current interactive technology adheres to this human social ability, humans can find the interaction with socially interactive technology effortless, fun, and enjoyable, resulting in positive experience and feelings of being competent, as well as that the technology provides long-term additional value to human life. Thus, the user’s experience of interaction with technology is of major concern and has lately received increased interest, and the quality of the human-technology interaction is pivotal. A certain kind of technology that might achieve this kind of effortless social interaction between human and technology is social robots. Positive user experience underpins the proliferation of social robots in society (Weiss et al., 2009), and, thus, the user experience of social robots needs to be a central issue of concern. But a positive user experience does not appear by itself. Instead, the positive user experience has to be systematically, thoroughly, and consciously designed for (Hartson & Pyla, 2012; Hassenzahl, 2013), and an embodied interaction approach has been considered a viable therorethical foundation (e.g., Dourish, 2001; Harper et al., 2008; Hartson & Pyla, 2012; Rogers, 2012) for designing the interaction between human and technology.

The development of social robots is in rapid progress and new advances in computer technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and other areas have resulted in advanced robotic technology that have major implications for the research field of human-robot interaction (HRI). HRI is a relatively new and growing research field dealing with the way humans can interact with robots in different ways, ranging from less complicated individual human-robot interaction in highly constrained tasks to play and multifarious cooperation with humans in teams. The field of HRI is supposed to have an impact on the types of relationships humans’ can have with robots in general, and socially interactive robots in particular (cf. e.g., Dautenhahn & Saunders, 2011; Goodrich & Schultz, 2007; Thrun, 2004). HRI focuses on both human and robot factors, and is therefore a highly interdisciplinary and challenging research field. One of the major goals of HRI is to find the ‘natural’ means by which humans can use to interact and communicate with robots (see e.g., Fong et al., 2003). However, the embodied nature of interactive robots (Breazeal, 2003; Thrun, 2004), has several implications on the social interactions between humans and robots. For example, the activities of the robots and humans need to be coordinated “here and now” and take place in physical space (Dautenhahn & Saunders, 2011). Moreover, Thrun (2004) pointed out that there are differences between these social robots according to interface capabilities, potential user groups, skills, and the different contexts of use, in comparison to more traditional interactive systems. Taken together, the issues addressed in HRI are different from, as well as more complex, than the ones in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), resulting in extensive challenges from several perspectives. The multi-disciplinary field of HRI offers many different views and approaches to the subject. We propose that research on embodiment, especially social and emotional interaction, can successfully be linked to the user experience of socially interactive robots, since embodied cognition can serve as a wider unifying theoretical perspective for HRI. Additionally, focusing on embodied cognition and the embodiment of (social) robots can challenge existing thinking in HRI research that have underestimated the influence of being embodied as a positive influence on the user experience.