No Joking Aside – Using Humor to Establish Sociality in HRI

This paper shows how humor can be used as an interaction pattern to help establish sociality in human-robot interaction. Drawing illustratively from our published research on people interacting with ATR's humanoid robot Robovie, we highlight four forms of humor that we successfully implemented: wit and the ice-breaker, corny joke, subtle humor, and dry humor and self-deprecation. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: Social Issues General Terms Design, Human Factors, Theory.