We propose to employ hazard labels to communicate a robot's potentially hazardous capabilities and behaviours to users. Robots can pose a range of ethical and physical safety concerns that users must be aware of when deciding whether to interact. We developed an initial set of key hazards, and a corresponding prototype of a hazard labeling scheme, to demonstrate the potential of this approach. We intend to use this prototype to support exploration of different styles of labeling, and ultimately to develop a more formalized system of robot hazard communication.

We explored the use of three robot interaction strategies to support people living with loneliness (physical comfort, social engagement, requiring care), by building these into a robot prototype and deploying the robots into homes for long-term evaluation. We placed our original prototype, SnuggleBot, unsupervised into the homes of seven people for at least 7 weeks (optionally up to 6 months), with bi-weekly interviews, to investigate how people engage with our three robot interaction strategies. Our qualitative analysis illuminated how people engaged the robot based on all three interaction strategies. Further, some participants showed signs of bonding with the robot as well as self-reported wellbeing benefits, while some participants failed to achieve sustained use over time. Our results provide strong support for future research into robots developed with our interaction strategies, and general potential for supporting wellbeing.

While children with disabilities often face barriers to play including reduced time, exclusion, and ill-suited toys, impacting their development, social robots provide the potential to help: they can motivate children, increase task engagement, and facilitate social interactions. However, social robots (and technological interventions in general) struggle to be adopted into regular use within homes by families, commonly being abandoned after a short time. Rather than focusing on the utility of these interventions, we instead look how they integrate into family needs and lifestyles. We designed and conducted a study where we engaged children living with disabilities and their families, using interactions with real robots and exploratory exercises, to learn about their perspectives, needs, and concerns regarding adopting a social companion robot in their home. We analyzed participant task engagement and feedback from the perspective of supporting play for children with disabilities and presented resulting design recommendations for addressing primary concerns and matching key expectations, and to support adoption pathways to improve the chances of success.

This paper presents a novel framework for describing human-robot interaction dialog, developed from a survey and analysis of existing systems and research. We collected data from 75 published systems and conducted an iterative thematic analysis to distill the broad range of work into key underlying factors de-fining them. Our framework provides a language to describe hu-man-robot dialog systems and a new way of classifying and under-standing human-robot dialog, in terms of both high-level design aspects and relevant implementation details. Our quantitative sur-vey summary further provides a detailed, contemporary snapshot of predominant approaches in the field, highlighting opportunities for further exploration.