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Experiences with Sparky, a Social Robot 179inappropriate. A friendly robot usually prompted subjects to touch the robot,mimic its motions and speak out loud to it. With the exception of older boys, asad, nervous or afraid robot generally provoked a compassionate response.Our interactions with users showed a potential need for future (autonomous)social robots to have a somewhat different sensory suite than current devices.For instance, we found it very helpful in creating a rich interaction to “sense”the location of bodies, faces and even individual eyes on users. We also foundit helpful to read basic facial expressions, such as smiles and frowns. Thisargues for a more sophisticated vision system, one focused on dealing withpeople. Additionally, it seemed essential to know where the robot was beingtouched. This may mean the development of a better artificial skin for robots.If possessed by an autonomous robot, the types of sensing listed above wouldsupport many of the behaviors that users found so compelling when interactingwith a teleoperated Sparky.Fortunately, there are some traditional robotic skills that Sparky, if it wereautonomous, might not need. For instance, there was no particular need for advancedmapping or navigation and no need, at least as a purely social creature,for detailed planning. A robot that could pay attention to people in its field ofview and had enough navigation to avoid bumping into objects would probablydo quite well in this human sphere. Even if future robots did occasionally bumpinto things or get lost, it shouldn’t be a problem: Sparky was often perceivedas acting reasonably even when a serious control malfunction left it behavingerratically. When the goal is to be perceived as “intelligent”, there are usuallymany acceptable actions for a given situation. Though it will be challengingto build these new social capabilities into mobile robots, humans are perhaps amore forgiving environment than roboticists are accustomed to.We close on a speculative, and perhaps whimsical, note. Users interactedwith Sparky using their bodies and, in turn, received feedback using this same,nearly universal, body language. This left us thinking not only of robots, butalso of the general question of communication in computer interfaces. Whatif these human-robot interactions were abstracted and moved into other realmsand into other devices? For instance, the gestures of head motion and gazedirection could map readily to a device’s success at paying attention to a user.Similarly, Sparky could intuitively demonstrate a certain energy level using itsposture and pace. Could another device use this technique to show its batterystate? Though our research didn’t focus on these questions, we believe thiscould be fertile ground for future work.Notes∗ Contact author: mark@markscheeff.com.