Sociable Trash Box

Summary form only given. The STB is capable of engaging manifold affiliation behaviors to build a social rapport toward the goal of collecting trash around an environment. In particular, STB is a child-dependent robot that walks alone in a public space for the purpose of tracing humans and trash and to collect the trash. In a crowded space, STBs move toward the trash by engaging with an attractive twisting motion (behaviors) and vocal interaction to convey STB´s intention to children. Our STB robot is incapable of collecting the trash by itself. In this sense, children have to infer a robot´s intentional stance or expectation for interaction with the STB. To collect trash while creating social rapport with children is a novel concept. The STB engages with twisting and bowing motions when children put trash into an STB container (figure 1).