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.

As part of the "Survivor Buddy" project, we have created an open source speech translator toolkit which allows written or spoken word from multiple independent controllers to be translated into either a single synthetic voice, synthetic voices for each controller, orunchanged natural voice of each controller. The human controllers can work via the internet or be physically co-located with the Survivor Buddy robot. The toolkit is expected to be of use for exploring voice in general human-robot interaction. The Survivor Buddy project is motivated by our prior work which suggests that a trapped victim of a disaster, or other human who is dependent, will treat a rescue robot as a social medium and that the choice of robotic voice will be important. The robot will be both a medium to the "outside" world and a local, independent entity devoted to the victim Figure 1: View from the Survivor Buddy webcam with subpicture (e.g., a buddy).