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Chapter 21EXPERIENCES WITH SPARKY, A SOCIAL ROBOTMark Scheeff, John Pinto, Kris Rahardja, Scott Snibbe and Robert TowAll formerly of Interval Research Corporation ∗AbstractIn an effort to explore human response to a socially competent embodied agent,we have a built a life-like teleoperated robot. Our robot uses motion, gesture andsound to be social with people in its immediate vicinity. We explored humanrobotinteraction in both private and public settings. Our users enjoyed interactingwith Sparky and treated it as a living thing. Children showed more engagementthan adults, though both groups touched, mimicked and spoke to the robotand often wondered openly about its intentions and capabilities. Evidence fromour experiences with a teleoperated robot showed a need for next-generation autonomoussocial robots to develop more sophisticated sensory modalities thatare better able to pay attention to people.1. IntroductionMuch work has been done on trying to construct intelligent robots but littleof that work has focused on how human beings respond to these creatures. Thisis partly because traditional artificial intelligence, when applied to robotics, hasoften focused on tasks that would be dangerous for humans (mine clearing,nuclear power, etc.). Even in the case of tasks in which humans are present,people are mostly seen as obstacles to be avoided. But what if we conceive ofa class of robots that are explicitly social with humans, that treat humans notas obstacles, but as their focus? There are at least two sides to this problemthat need studying: first, how do you construct a socially competent robot and,second, how do people respond to it. Our work has focused on studying thelatter question, human response to a socially competent robot.To that end, we have constructed a robot, Sparky, whose purpose is to besocial with humans in its vicinity. Since we are studying human response,we have not tried to solve the problem of generating reasonable autonomous