Interacting with Your Robot

Alex Pang reports on work that studies how people interact with their robot. Notably the most common household robot of today, the IRobot Roomba. I would be particularly interested in how this kind of interaction compares with some of the human machine interactions reported in The Media Equation. Are there fundamental differences between symbolic representations on a screen and things that move around in the real world? The article seems to be mostly about how people bonded with robots, in perhaps not unexpected ways, by giving them names, etc. I would further like to seen how interactions between robot and people evolved. This may help us with robotic design and integration in the future. Original article.