Long term human-robot interaction: The personal exploration rovers and museum docents

As an increasing number of robots have been designed to interact with people on a regular basis, research into human-robot interaction has become more widespread. At the same time, little work has been done on the problem of longterm human-robot interaction, in which a human uses a robot for a period of weeks or months. As people spend more time with a robot, it is expected that how they make sense of the robot - their “cognitive model” of it - may change over time. In order to identify factors that will be critical to the future development of a quantitative cognitive model of long-term human-robot interaction, a study was conducted involving the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) museum exhibit and the museum employees responsible for it. Results of the study suggest that these critical factors include how people experience successes and failures with the robot (as opposed to how they understand its capabilities) and how people anthropomorphize the robot and talk about anthropomorphization.