Tell me more! A Robot’s Struggle to Achieve Artificial Awareness

There are many cognitive and psychophysical theories to explain human behavior as well as the behavior of robots. Even so, we still lack a model to perceive and predict appropriate behaviors for both the human and the robot during a human-robot encounter. Humans make an instant evaluation of their surroundings and its people before approaching a person or a situation. As robots become more common in social environments, a similar perception of the situation around a human user prior to an interaction is required. Social constraints during an interaction could be demolished by a faulty assessment. Through this paper, we discuss the requirements of a robot to proactively perceive a situation’s nature and take an effort to report functional units which come into play during such an encounter. We further identify the cues that are utilized by such intelligent agents to simulate and evaluate the outcomes of their environment. From this, we discuss the requirements of a unified theory of cognition during human-robot encounters. We also highlight implications for design constraints in such a scenario.