The identity design of artificial agents carries growing ethical, psychological, and cultural weight, as ubiquitous language models and diverse robotic forms are blended into everyday use. However, structured approaches to designing coherent and interpretable artificial identities remain limited. To address urgent challenges in artificial identity design, including harmful stereotypes and deceptive practices, we introduce the Identity Design (ID) Framework and an accompanying research agenda. Drawing on emerging work on artificial identity in human-robot interaction and taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we propose twelve design principles across three levels: individual (recognisability, behavioural consistency, identity continuity, memory, persistent goals), group (membership signalling, social alignment, role clarity), and societal (benevolence, artificiality, social justice, transparency). The research agenda outlines open questions around the operationalisation and measurement of identity, social dynamics, and ethical considerations for identity design. Together, they lay the groundwork for future research and responsible practice in robotic, virtual, and multi-embodied agents.

This study explores how robot embodiment influences human perceptions of robot teammates in virtual reality (VR) environments. In a mixed-design experiment, we simulated an immersive control room where participants enacted teaming with autonomous robots to respond to emergency events. We investigated the effects of robot re-embodiment during VR collaboration, comparing avatar type (machinelike, augmented, humanlike) for different robot types (a drone, vehicle, and humanoid) on perceptions of robot teammates. We found increased anthropomorphism improved perceptions of the robots’ nonverbal expressiveness and bodily-based capabilities but reduced the perceived appearance-based trustworthiness of the robots. Despite their limited non-verbal communication abilities, machinelike embodiments were perceived as more suitable for VR interaction. At the same time, our results suggest that augmented forms offer a compromise, improving the non-verbal communication capabilities of non-anthropomorphic robots with little impact on perceptions of intelligence, trustworthiness, or social abilities. These findings highlight the trade-offs in designing multi-embodied artificial teammates and suggest that alignment between appearance and functionality is critical for effective VR-based human-robot teams.

Multi-embodied agents can have both physical and virtual bodies, moving between real and virtual environments to meet user needs, embodying robots or virtual agents alike to support extended human-agent relationships. As a design paradigm, multi-embodiment offers potential benefits to improve communication and access to artificial agents, but there are still many unknowns in how to design these kinds of systems. This paper presents the results of a scoping review of the multi-embodiment research, aimed at consolidating the existing evidence and identifying knowledge gaps. Based on our review, we identify key research themes of: multi-embodied systems, identity design, human-agent interaction, environment and context, trust, and information and control. We also identify 16 key research challenges and 12 opportunities for future research.