Providing for Social Acceptance in Task Modelling for Robots

A proper behaviour of a robot is probably of importance when we consider the possibility of having it accepted by people. For example, it has been shown that erratic or unexplained behaviour tends to be a cause of distrust in the robot. There are several other, more non-technical issues that need to be fulfilled by the robot in order to make it acceptable in society. Even for cognitive, intelligent and largely autonomous robots their tasks need to be modelled. One such task modelling method, task patterns, has been proposed earlier as a language for describing robot activities. In this article it is suggested that the task pattern language can be extended through a framework based on the ideas behind Design Patterns, to also incorporate modelling of task properties that are important to the acceptance of a robot in a social environment.