Using Social Media Platforms for Human-Robot Interaction in Domestic Environment

This article explores the application of existing social media platforms for human–robot interaction. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms that connect humans, we propose to portray domestic robots as buddies on the contact list of family members and present a robot management system that employs complementary social media platforms for humans to interact with the vacuuming robot Roomba and a surveillance robot developed on top of iRobot Create. The social media platforms adopted include short message services (SMS), instant messenger (MSN), an online shared calendar (Google Calendar), and a social networking site (Facebook). Hence, we can provide a rich set of user-familiar, intuitive, and highly accessible interfaces, allowing users to flexibly choose their preferred tools in different situations. An in-lab experiment and a multiday field study are conducted to study the characteristics and strengths of each interface and to investigate users’ perception to the robots and behaviors in choosing the interfaces.