A Systematic Approach to Modeling Structured Behavior in Social Robots

Social Robots (SRs) often require structured models of behavior to facilitate sophisticated interaction episodes in their capacity as coaches, teachers, assistants, and beyond. Techniques in human-centered design can support the translation of human-human to human-robot behavior, but can be challenging and often lead to weak interpretations. We introduce a four-step approach of data gathering, behavior model development, behavior model annotation, and robot implementation to promote a more systematic approach to the development of SR behaviors. The efficacy of this approach was demonstrated in a set of case studies involving 24 participants. We demonstrate how a structured behavior model for a SR was developed systematically by clustering observed human interaction episodes, and that the researchers’ original translations of human to robot behavior models captured task knowledge, but in each case, our model annotation step was necessary to validate the designs and further refine missing aspects.