Experiences with Sparky, a Social Robot

Abstract

In an effort to explore human response to a socially competent embodied agent, we have a built a life-like teleoperated robot. Our robot uses motion, gesture and sound to be social with people in its immediate vicinity. We explored human-robot interaction in both private and public settings. Our users enjoyed interacting with Sparky and treated it as a living thing. Children showed more engagement than adults, though both groups touched, mimicked and spoke to the robot and often wondered openly a bout its intentions and capabilities. Evidence from our experiences with a teleoperated robot showed a need for next-generation autonomous social robots to develop more sophisticated sensory modalities that are better able to pay attention to people. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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