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.

Agent design has to date concerned itself with the issues pertaining to a single body embedded in a single environment, whether virtual or real. This paper discusses the notion of an agent capable of migrating between information spaces (physical worlds, virtual reality, and digital information spaces). An architecture is presented that facilitates agent migration and mutation within such environments. This will in turn support agent evolution the ultimate in agent adaptivity.