What do we think we are doing: principles of coupled self-regulation in human-robot interaction (HRI)

The use of domestic service robots is becoming widespread. While in industrial settings robots are often used for specified tasks, the challenge in the case of robots put to domestic use is to afford human-robot collaboration in a variety of non-predefined and different daily tasks. Herein,we aim at identifying and understanding the conditions that will facilitate flexible collaboration between humans and robots. Past research of social and personality psychology was mainly focused on individual’s self-regulation, defined as the ability to govern, or direct attention, resources, or action toward the realization of a particular goal (Higgins, 1989; Kruglanski et al., 2002). There is evidence that pursuing goals with the presence of others influences self-control (Fishbach and Trope, 2005), however only little is known on dyadic processes of self-regulation. Additionally,whereas research of goal pursuit in social psychology has mainly been associated with general processes of the structure and function of goals (Gollwitzer and Bargh, 1996; Carver and Scheier,1998; Kruglanski et al., 2002; Fishbach and Ferguson, 2007; Custers and Aarts, 2010), human-robot interaction involves pragmatic interpersonal dilemmas such as how to coordinate human-robot activity and what knowledge should be shared between humans and robots over the course of action. To fill this gap, in what follows, we will define the unique characteristics of what we term as human-robot coupled self-regulation, which has the unique features of a dyadic asymmetric teamaimed to increase the affordances of an individual in different activities. We will describe the unique characteristics of human-robot interaction and its special challenges toward goal pursuit.