3. Importance of social and psychological factors in interaction robotics

3.1 Relationships between users and robots

The relationship a user can have with his robot can be extremely complex, and there is no standard. A robot designer may want to confine the user to a certain predefined type of interaction, but reality shows that it's actually much more complex than that. And that's why robots are so interesting to study.

Taken at face value, the relationship between robot and user is undoubtedly banal and purely functional; however, this is rarely the case in most situations. The social role defined in section 1.2 does not determine the relationship between user and robot. Indeed, even if it's not explicit, the robot in general, and the companion robot even more so, constantly questions the user's relationship with the living world,...