Valerie the roboceptionist is the most recent addition to Carnegie Mellon's social robots project. A permanent installation in the entranceway to Newell-Simon hall, the robot combines useful functionality - giving directions, looking up weather forecasts, etc. - with an interesting and compelling character. We are using Valerie to investigate human-robot social interaction, especially long-term human-robot "relationships". Over a nine-month period, we have found that many visitors continue to interact with the robot on a daily basis, but that few of the individual interactions last for more than 30 seconds. Our analysis of the data has indicated several design decisions that should facilitate more natural human-robot interactions.

This paper presents the results of an experiment in human-robot social interaction. Its purpose was to measure the impact of certain features and behaviors on people's willingness to engage in a short interaction with a robot. The behaviors tested were the ability to convey expression with a humanoid face and the ability to indicate attention by turning towards the person that the robot is addressing. We hypothesized that these features were minimal requirements for effective social interaction between a human and a robot. We will discuss the results of the experiment and their implications for the design of socially interactive robots.

Believable agents usually depend upon explicit, model-based simulations of human emotions. This work appeals instead to the sensibilities of dramatic acting to create agents that are believable. The chosen task is that of comedy improvisation as it provides a solid demonstration of the agents' believability in the context of a high-level deliberative goal. Furthermore, this work employs physical robots as the actors, employing the real-time sensor values from the robots as inputs into the acting process. This paper describes the dramatic approach to acting that we used and describes the Java-based implementation on two Nomad Scout robots. Actual, improvised scripts created by the robots are included and analyzed.