From Inanimate Object to Agent: Impact of Pre-beginnings on the Emergence of Greetings with a Robot

Abstract

The very first moments of co-presence, during which a robot appears to a participant for the first time, are often “off-the-record” in the data collected from human-robot experiments (video recordings, motion tracking, methodology sections, etc.). Yet, this “pre-beginning” phase, well documented in the case of human-human interactions, is not an interactional vacuum: It is where interactional work from participants can take place so the production of a first speaking turn (like greeting the robot) becomes relevant and expected. We base our analysis on an experiment that replicated the interaction opening delays sometimes observed in laboratory or “in-the-wild” human-robot interaction studies—where robots can require time before springing to life after they are in co-presence with a human. Using an ethnomethodological and multimodal conversation analytic methodology (EMCA), we identify which properties of the robot's behavior were oriented to by participants as creating the adequate conditions to produce a first greeting. Our findings highlight the importance of the state in which the robot originally appears to participants: as an immobile object or, instead, as an entity already involved in preexisting activity. Participants’ orientations to the very first behaviors manifested by the robot during this “pre-beginning” phase produced a priori unpredictable sequential trajectories, which configured the timing and the manner in which the robot emerged as a social agent. We suggest that these first instants of co-presence are not peripheral issues with respect to human-robot experiments but should be thought about and designed as an integral part of those.