Robots are being considered for applications where they serve as proxies for humans interacting with another human,such as emergency response, hostage negotiation, and healthcare. In these domains, the human (“dependent”) is connected to multiple other humans (“controllers”) via the robot proxy for long periods of time. The dependent may want to interact with humans but also to engage the robot as a medium to the World Wide Web. In the future, medical personnel may use the robot for victim assistance and comfort while the rescue team plans and monitors extrication. Other applications include healthcare, where the robot is the link between a patient and a medical provider for intermittent,routine interactions, and hostage negotiation, where police may use a bomb squad robot to talk with and build rapport with the suspect while the SWAT team uses the robot’s sensors to build and maintain situation awareness.Under funding from the National Science Foundation, we are finishing the first year of investigating verbal and nonverbal communication strategies for robots who are serving as proxies for multiple humans interact with the humans who are dependent on them. Our work posits that such a robot would occupy a novel social medium position according to the Computers as Social Actors (CASA) model [Nass,Steuer, and Tauber1994] [Reeves and Nass1996]. Given that teleoperated robots are treated socially, it is unlikely that a rescue robot would be treated as a pure medium even if playing music or videos. Likewise, the limitations of autonomy and the interactions of specialists with the dependent prevent the robot from being a true social actor. Instead, social actor and pure medium are two extremes on the agent identity spectrum, with a social medium occupying a middle position.A social medium would be perceived as a loyal, helpful “go between” who is an advocate for the dependent, rather than a device for accomplishing the goals of multiple controllers(medical specialist, structural engineer, rescue operations official, etc.). To explore the social medium identity,we have built a physical prototype of a Survivor Buddy and are creating autonomous affective behaviors and a social medium toolkit to explore human-robot interaction.

Lane changing on highways is stressful. In this paper, we present RASCL, the Robotic Assistance System for Changing Lanes. RASCL combines state-of-the-art sensing and localization techniques with an accurate map describing road structure to detect and track other cars, determine whether or not a lane change to either side is safe, and communicate these safety statuses to the user using a variety of audio and visual interfaces. The user can interact with the system through specifying the size of their “comfort zone”, engaging the turn signal, or by simply driving across lane dividers. Additionally, RASCL provides speed change recommendations that are predicted to turn an unsafe lane change situation into a safe situation and enables communication with other vehicles by automatically controlling the turn signal when the driver attempts to change lanes without using the turn signal.