What is it about?
We explored a robotic ball's potential to promote physical activity at home through a four day workshop with theatre professionals and human-robot interaction (HRI) researchers from a performative lens. In this workshop, a puppeteer controlling the robotic ball and two actors improvised human-robot encounters in a staged home environment. These professionals also reflected on their experiences throughout these enactments in the form of dialogues with HRI researchers. Through these enactments and reflections, we collectively explored the emergence of HRI, through which humans were triggered to move. We unpacked these particular interactions in terms of robot behavior, human reactions, and contextual factors. As a result, we identified nine interaction design patterns that can initiate different types of physical activity with varying intensity levels. These nine interaction patterns can also be combined to form complex robot behaviors to sustain physical activity. These patterns serve as a valuable starting point for developing spherical robots intended for home-based healthcare applications. Moreover, the results showed how a robotic ball can flexibly be framed as a creature, tool, or plaything, suggesting the emergence of a hybrid subtype of social agents.
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Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In this work, we approached HRI from a performative lens, which posits that a robot’s social characteristics are co-created within its encounters with humans and cannot be attributed to predefined, preprogrammed behaviors. This lens helped us to create robot behaviors that are situated, context-dependent, and flexible—well-suited for ever-changing home environments. These behaviors can be personalized and combined to form more complex ones, contributing to the development of behavioral libraries for spherical robots aimed at home-based healthcare. Moreover, the performative lens allowed us to demonstrate that social robots do not need to possess anthropomorphic features to be perceived as social. We propose that spherical robots may represent an emerging hybrid subtype of social agents.
Perspectives
Social robots do not always need to resemble or imitate humans or animals to facilitate meaningful interaction. Our research demonstrates that even a simple robotic ball can be perceived as a social agent, capable of eliciting both social and physical engagement. This insight was made possible by approaching HRI as a form of performance, highlighting the value of drawing inspiration from the performing arts to enrich the field.
Eda Karaosmanoglu
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring the Potential of Spherical Robots to Promote Physical Activity at Home: A Pattern Language, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, April 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3727990.
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