A touchscreen-based ‘Sandtray’ to facilitate, mediate and contextualise human-robot social interaction

In the development of companion robots capable of any-depth, long-term interaction, social scenarios enable exploration of the robot´s capacity to engage a human interactant. These scenarios are typically constrained to structured task-based interactions, to enable the quantification of results for the comparison of differing experimental conditions. This paper introduces a hardware setup to facilitate and mediate human-robot social interaction, simplifying the robot control task while enabling an equalised degree of environmental manipulation for the human and robot, but without implicitly imposing an a priori interaction structure.