Humans and Robots Together: engineering sociality and collaboration

Intelligent agents and robots will become part of our daily lives. As they do, they will not only carry out specific tasks in the environment but also to partner with us socially and collaboratively. Groups of social robots may interact with groups of humans performing joint activities. Yet, research related to hybrid groups of humans and robots is still limited. What does it mean to be part of a hybrid group? Can social robots team up with humans? How do humans respond to social robots as partners? Do humans trust them? To research these questions we need a deep understanding of how robots can interact socially in group. That involves being able to identify and characterize group members, evaluate the dependencies between the behaviors of different members, understand and consider different roles, and infer the dynamics of group interactions in a group, led by a common past to build an anticipated future. In this talk I will discuss how to engineer social robots that act autonomously as members of a group collaborating with both humans and other robots. different aspects need to be considered: what type of interaction mechanisms need to be built in the social robots to act in groups; how to build the capabilities that makes them able to perceive, identify and understand the human members of a group; how to model and retain information about past shared experiences of a group; how to model and adapt to the emotions of a group; and how to allow for a robot to respond to the dynamics of social interactions [Correia et al. 2019]. I will start by providing an overview of recent research in social human-robot teams, and present different scenarios to illustrate the work. I will explore the application in the context of education [Alves-Oliveira et al. 2019] and entertainment [Correia et al. 2016] [Oliveira et al. 2018], describing how autonomous robotic partners may take into account different preferences and characteristics by the humans, and act in a social manner respecting the group's characteristics [Correia et al. 2018].