This paper reviews "socially interactive robots": robots for which social human-robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the di#erent forms of "social robots". We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report[61].

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This paper proposes an epigenetic bridge between embodiment and situatedness based on the conceptual framework of "situated embodiment" (Zlatev 1999). The term Epigenesis refers to individual development through incremental change between levels of competence of increasing complexity, achieved through the interaction with the physical (Piaget) and the socio-cultural (Vygotsky) environment. The idea of incremental adaptation is a simple, but developmentally and evolutionally appropriate way to ground the human-robot communication in knowledge deriving from our bodies and from our social environment.

Abstract Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed for simple, natural, nonverbal interaction with children. The minimal design of Keepon’s appearance and behavior is meant to intuitively and comfortably convey the robot’s expressions of attention and emotion. For the past few years, we have been observing interactions between Keepon and children at various levels of physical, mental, and social development. With typically developing children, we have observed varying styles of play that suggest a progression in ontological understanding of the robot. With children suffering from developmental disorders such as autism, we have observed interactive behaviors that suggest Keepon’s design is effective in eliciting a motivation to share mental states. Finally, in developing technology for interpersonal coordination and interactional synchrony, we have observed an important role of rhythm in establishing engagement between people and robots. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of work done with Keepon to date. Some portions of this paper are modified from content appearing in