Sarah Gillet, Marynel Vázquez, Sean Andrist, Iolanda Leite, Sarah Sebo (2024). Interaction-shaping Robotics: Robots That Influence Interactions between Other Agents. In ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.
Recent research in the HRI community has shown that robots can influence interactions beyond the reciprocal interaction between human and robot. Robots can influence interactions between other agents, e.g., people. This paper invites the community to address works that study the influence on other agents as interaction-shaping robotics (ISR).
The paper discuss five key factors of interaction-shaping robots: the robot’s role in the interaction, the robot-shaping outcome, the form of robot influence, the type of robot communication, and the timeline of the robot’s influence. Further, we discuss three different group strcuctures that we find particularly interesting when studying interaction-shaping robotics. We conclude the paper by discussing computational, methodological and ethical challenges when studying interaction-shaping robotics.