Design spaces and niche spaces of believable social robots

This paper discusses the design space of believable social robots. We synthesise ideas and concepts from areas as diverse as comics design and rehabilitation robotics. First, we revisit the work of the Japanese researcher Masahiro Mori in the context of recent developments in social robots. Next, we discuss work in the arts into comics design, an area which has dealt for decades with the problem of creating believable characters. Finally, in order to illustrate some of the important issues involved we focus on a particular application area: the use of interactive robots in autism therapy, work that is carried out in the Aurora project. We discuss design issues of social robots in the context of 'design spaces' and 'niche spaces', concepts that have been defined originally for intelligent agent architectures but which, we propose, can be highly valuable for social robotics design. This paper is meant to open up a discussion towards a systematic exploration of design spaces and niche spaces of social robots.