Grounding a sociable robot’s movements in multimodal, situational engagements

Abstract

To deal with the question of what a sociable robot is, we describe how an educational robot is encountered by children, teachers and designers in a preschool. We consider the importance of the robot’s body by focusing on how its movements are contingently embedded in interactional situations. We point out that the effects of agency that these movements generate are inseparable from their grounding in locally coordinated, multimodal actions and interactions.