Individual Differences and Biohybrid Societies

Contemporary robot design is influenced both by task domain (e.g., industrial manipulation versus social interaction) as well as by classification differences in humans (e.g., therapy patients versus museum visitors). As the breadth of robot use increases, we ask how will people respond to the ever increasing number of intelligent artefacts in their environment. Using the Paro robot as our case study we propose an analysis of individual differences in HRI to highlight the consequences individual characteristics have on robot performance. We discuss to what extent human-human interactions are a useful model of HRI.