Communicating with and Relating to Social Robots: Alice Meets Leolani’ – Alani

Principal investigator of Alani where we study how social communication and relationships between robots and humans develop as two sides of the same coin: bonding results in better communication and better communication results in better socio-affective bonding. We propose a theoretical framework integrating both perspectives that guides the development of different robot scenarios that will be empirically tested in different user groups. We combine the Theory of Affective Bonding from a social sciences perspective with the Theory of Identity, Reference and Perspective from a linguistics perspective to optimally program social robots for communicative purposes. Likewise, a multi-method approach integrates qualitative and quantitative research designs, for short- and long-term studies both in the field and in the lab. Furthermore, the research combines and extends the results of two previously developed systems for the robots Alice and Leolani, resulting in a merged novel system Alani.