When predicting the technological development of assistive systems in everyday environments it
may be assumed that the future home will contain more electronic devices than it does today. We
already have a great deal of technology and even robots in our homes. For example vacuum
cleaner robots are used to clean floors fully autonomously. People are becoming more accustomed
to robots. Even the elderly are learning to interact naturally with the seal robot Paro.
However problems may emerge as robots become more and more human-like. But as robots are
developed to address more complex tasks i.e. for serving as social interfaces or housekeeping
it becomes more reasonable to design human-like robots. This shape has the advantage that the
interaction becomes more natural. But it is exactly this human-like shape that often evokes
fear and discomfort. When the robot becomes too human-like or too powerful and intelligent
especially people in the western world become scared. This vision of what robots could be or do
in the future can be seen in literature or movies where authors express the fear that robots
could become dangerous for humans as seen in the Terminator movies or in Isaac Asimov s I
Robot . This leads people to have an incorrect view of what real humanoid robots are like. In
order to reduce these fears it has become important to convince people that robots are
friendly and that it is pleasant to interact with them. Therefore this book aims to evaluate
the effects of social behavior of robots onto the human observer. Is it possible to let a robot
appear more social and less frightened by just changing the way the robot moves? Is it possible
to improve the performance of a cooperative task of a human and a robot by using human-like
cues? The research is based on a structured investigation of the influence of several movement
patterns like breathing blinking and natural movements. Further an extensive interaction
study was done whereby biophysiological measurements were used in order to evaluate the
reaction of the human body onto the robot whole body behavior.
