ROBOT-BOND · Understanding Human-Robot Bonding to Optimize Personal Support

Robots are rapidly entering the human arena as social entities to support education and healthcare where human resources fall short. The ease and naturalness with which humans interact with social robots forebode a high potential but also present new scientific challenges. I see a paradox of nt wanting to emulate humans in robots but still create the human feel in connectedness. Ample research has been done in engineering, design and computer sciences, yet, the question from a human perspective is understudied: Why would one be willing to befriend such a thing? While building affective relationships is crucial to prolonged human-robot interaction, no encompassing theory exists that explains how, why, and when humans would bond with robots. My aim is to fill this knowledge gap and unravel the paradox, by bridging the fragmented multi-disciplinary knowledge in a novel cross-disciplinary and integrative model of Human-Robot Bonding, explaining how and why people differ in relating to robots and when robots can (not) provide personal support. My model identifies key propositions underlying bonding with robots and elucidates how people process reality- and media-based information, explicate the role of emotional states, relevant needs, and affordances, empirically examined through varying communication contexts. My advantageous multi-method approach pairs fundamental with in-situ research, tests my model in lab-studies (WP1) and the real world: in education (WP2&3), healthcare (WP4), and therapy (WP5). It uniquely compares autonomous social robots in different roles in longitudinal designs with new psychometrically sound measurement devices and Bayesian statistics, to bring required methodological innovations to the field. Results complement and integrate current perspectives on robots, enrich the understanding of communication, and has potential ground-breaking implications for science nd society (WP6), envisioning expansive applicability of communication robots.