HRI research: The interdisciplinary challenge or the dawning of the discipline?

The Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research field has developed more and more over the past 10 to 20 years. It is still a relatively young community, which is in the process of developing its characteristics, such as being interdisciplinary, innovative, responsible, technical, and many others. Similarly, like in the development of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, being interdisciplinary is essential, but if we have a look on the current situation, HCI became more of an autonomous discipline nowadays. Where is the HRI community heading to in this respect? This paper should reflect in accordance to the “epistemic living spaces” concept on some stereotypical statements by researchers working in HRI. The reflection shows that in three phases of a researcher´s career (orientation, positioning, and stabilizing and expanding) show a tendency towards the discipline and away from interdisciplinary work and that the forth phase (attachment) needs to be strengthened, independently of disciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches.