Construction of social relationships between user and robot

The relationship between human users and their assistive robots is fundamen tally social. This paper describes a novel design approach that deals expli citly with the social aspects of human-robot communication. This concept is heavily influenced by the theory of Social Responses to Communication Tech nologies (SRCT) and psychological research at Stanford University and elsew here showing the power of teams in complex command, design and learning sce narios. We have built two personalities into our system; each is expected t o maintain a personal relationship with the user, in this case people with severe physical disabilities and the therapists responsible fur their rehab ilitation. Functioning as a team, these computer-embedded personalities wor k with the user's own persons to help manage and make useful the special ca pabilities of our robot. The graphical user interface, embodying Jiminey, t he smart consultant/coach, and Pinocchio, the down-to-earth arm itself, is designed to allow the operators to create, modify and execute manipulation tasks using a small desktop robot system called ProVAR. Follow-on clinical studies will be conducted to validate the ProVAR dual-character concept. (C ) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science S.V. All rights reserved.