Making sense of robots together: Examining group interactions with Pepper: Position paper

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is traditionally addressed as interaction of one human user with a single robot. In this workshop contribution we reflect upon HRI in group interactions. Our approach follows ethnomethodological conversation analysis, and we present excerpts from a videorecorded study of group interaction with Pepper. We draw attention to how the observations and interpretations of robots’ behaviors are situationally and socially given a meaning by the human participants acting together, and that this inevitably has implications for both design and theory of HRI. We conclude that a robot is configured as social through human interactions, as robots can provide interpretable and observable materials that people ordinarily use in social interactions with each other.