This article focuses on the conviction that has been popular within parts of the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community and beyond that social robots are or soon will become part of our everyday lives. Given the limited availability of social robots on the market and their evident absence in everyday environments, such a conviction is viewed here as highly inaccurate and, hence, quite astonishing in its prevalence and power. We argue that since social robots continue to be research platforms in the first place, depicting them as everyday objects leads to a profound paradox that hinders the successful integration of robots into society. A big part of the problem is in rigid conceptualisations of the social robot and conventional views of everyday life. In an attempt to offer an alternative approach, we propose to redefine the dominant perspectives on ‘interaction’ in HRI research to embrace the notion of ‘integration’ and ‘lived experience’ instead and by doing so, capture the complexity and transformative potential of the everyday. We argue that ‘everyday life’ can potentially become not so much a point of arrival as a point of departure for HRI research and a catalyst for critical and creative thinking of human-robot futures.

This paper belongs to the area of roboethics and responsible robotics. It discusses the conceptual and practical separation of humans and robots in designing and implementing robots into real-world environments. We argue here that humans are often seen as a component that is only optional in design thinking, and in some cases even an obstacle to the success of robot performance. Such an approach may vary from viewing humans as a factor that does not belong to the robotics domain, through attempts to 'adjust' humans to robot requirements and to the overall replacement of humans with robots. Such separation or exclusion of humans poses serious ethical challenges, including the very exclusion of ethics from our thinking about robots.

This position paper discusses the question of incorporating roboethics into the roboticists' thinking about their research. On the one hand, there has been a growing recognition of the need to develop and advance the field of roboethics. On the other hand, for different reasons, a large part of the robotics community has still been reluctant to explicitly address ethical considerations in robotics research. We argue here that in order to facilitate and foster ethical reflection in roboticists' work, roboethics should be seen as a research puzzle. This implies studying rather than only applying specific ethical principles, as well as taking highly creative and pioneering approaches towards emerging ethical challenges.

Mars rovers are an extension of the human body, which brings the human presence to another planet. In addition to human-centric senses such as vision and audio, they also extend human cognition into unknown spaces. This paper argues that Mars rovers should embrace not only the embodied but also the social aspect of a human being and judiciously embrace anthropomorphism in rover design in order to augment our exploration of distant locations.

Humans use a variety of technological artefacts to explore outer space, with robotics developing as an important field. Space exploration also provides an opportunity to develop social robotics. It has been shown that prolonged social isolation increases the tendency to anthropomorphise nonhuman agents. While it is recognised that an illusion of humanness can be successfully created in inanimate objects, whether it is possible to maintain such an illusion over time remains to be understood. Manned space missions provide an example of intense isolation, hence, a particularly sharp focus on our tendency to anthropomorphise and an opportunity for long-term Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies. The use of social robots in space missions will contribute to understanding anthropomorphism and social interaction that involves not only astronauts but also other socially isolated individuals who are often targeted in HRI research. This paper adopts the stance that the goal of social robotics in a space exploration context is to constructively develop an illusion of human traits in a machine in order to either help manage a need for a degree of social interaction, or to extend human sensing and action through more immersive telepresence robotics.

This paper discusses people's willingness to suspend their beliefs of what is living in physical social robotics. Our attention focuses on users' perception of the machines they interact with, in particular how much fiction can persist in human-robot interaction. We expand on this concept of suspension of disbelief (SoD) in order to understand the role and nature of user engagement in robotics and to discuss a balance between fantasy and realism, between user expectation and the design challenges faced by robotics.