Young Researchers’ Views on the Current and Future State
of HRI
Kevin Gold
Department of Computer Science
Yale University
51 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT, USA 06511
kevin.gold@yale.edu
Ian Fasel
Machine Perception Laboratory
Institute for Neural Computation
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr.
La Jolla, CA, 92093 USA
ianfasel@mplab.ucsd.edu
Nathan G. Freier
The Information School
University of Washington
Box 354985
Seattle, WA, USA 98195
nfreier@u.washington.edu
Cristen Torrey
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
ctorrey@cs.cmu.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the results of a panel discussion titled
“The Future of HRI,” held during an NSF workshop for
graduate students on human-robot interaction in August
2006. The panel divided the workshop into groups tasked
with inventing models of the field, and then asked these
groups their opinions on the future of the field. In general,
the workshop participants shared the belief that HRI can
and should be seen as a single scientific discipline, despite
the fact that it encompasses a variety of beliefs, methods,
and philosophies drawn from several “core” disciplines in
traditional areas of study. HRI researchers share many in-
terrelated goals, participants felt, and enhancing the lines
of communication between different areas would help speed
up progress in the field. Common concerns included the un-
availability of common robust platforms, the emphasis on
human perception over robot perception, and the paucity
of longitudinal real-world studies. The authors point to the
current lack of consensus on research paradigms and plat-
forms to argue that the field is not yet in the phase that
philosopher Thomas Kuhn would call “normal science,” but
believe the field shows signs of approaching that phase.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
I.2.9 [Artificial Intelligence]: [Robotics]; K.2 [Computing
Milieux]: [History of Computing]
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee.
HRI’07, March 10–12, 2007, Arlington, Virginia, USA.
Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-617-2/07/0003 ...$5.00.
General Terms
Human Factors
Keywords
Human Robot Interaction, HRI, student perspectives, paradigms,
history of science, future, workshop panel, robotic platforms,
Kuhn
1. INTRODUCTION
Early in August 2006, an NSF-funded graduate student
workshop in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) was held in
Carmel, California. The goal of the workshop (a one-time
event) was to help foster the development of a stronger com-
munity among the young HRI researchers who’s views and
research goals will shape the field in the future. The work-
shop was organized around student panels, including such
topics as “Social Robots” and “Robots in Teams.” The
workshop participants included students and faculty from
across the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Korea, and represented
a broad range of areas of HRI research, including social
robotics, mobile robot interfaces, theory of robot interac-
tion, and robot designers.
The authors of the present paper were asked by the work-
shop organizers to form a panel on “The Future of HRI,”
with Torrey as the panel lead. Rather than attempt to im-
pose our own view on the other 22 graduate students and
6 faculty attending the workshop, we decided to invert the
panel and ask all those assembled about their views on the
present and future of HRI. In this way, we hoped we might
gain a broad picture both of where the field currently is and
where these young researchers intend to take it.
Others in the HRI field have attempted to characterize
its central problems and future directions, but few have
attempted to span the entire field of HRI, and none have
explicitly inquired into conceptions of young researchers in
the field. For example, Fong, Nourbakhsh, and Dauten-
hahn [8] surveyed the work conducted on social robots, dis-