Social Robots for Long-Term Interaction: A Survey

Abstract As the field of HRI evolves, it is important to understand how users interact with robots over long periods. This paper reviews the current research on long-term interaction between users and social robots. We describe the main features of these robots and highlight the main findings of the existing long-term studies. We also present a set of directions for future research and discuss some open issues that should be addressed in this field.

Introduction. Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a multidisciplinary field concerned with the “analysis, design, modelling, implementation and evaluation of robots for human use” [18]. While a lot of work has been done in studying how users interact with robots within a single interaction, only in the last decade the first long-term studies, in which the same user (or group of users) interacts with a robot several times, have started to appear. There are several reasons for this. First, longitudinal studies are much more laborious and timeconsuming than short-term studies [20], especially in naturalistic environments. Second, only recently technology has been robust enough to allow for some degree of autonomy when users interact with robots for extended periods of time. Finally, the appearance of the first commercial social robots (e.g., Pleo and Paro) and robots for domestic use such as iRobot’s Roomba, together with demographic trends such as the ageing of the world population, are also fostering research in this area.

Discussion / Conclusion. All the presented studies (see Table 1 for a summary) found positive results regarding the long-term effects of social robots in therapeutic or health-related scenarios. However, the users who took part in these studies were very different (elderly, autistic children and adults), and thus further research is needed to consolidate these results. Moreover,