Designing human-robot interaction via physical world objects

This paper proposes a new communication model based on physical world objects. In usual human-robot interaction, a human looks on the robot's behaviors without responding to them and seldom immerses him/herself in the interaction. The communication model achieves human's immersion in interaction with two types of behaviors. The first draws human's attention to a physical world object or a physical world state. The second stimulates a human's feeling under the attention. The novel idea of the model is to employ the actual physical objects to mediate the human-robot interaction. In particular, since the second behavior relates directly to a sort of human's sensory perception, it is easy for a human to become aware of the referent of the robot's behavior. As a result of the two behaviors, he/she begins to infer robot's intentions and immerses him/herself in the interaction.