Outside-in design for interdisciplinary hri research

This paper introduces "outside-in design" as a collaborative approach to social robot design and human-robot interaction research. As an interdisciplinary group of social and computer scientists, we follow an iterative practice of collecting and analyzing data from real-world interaction, designing appropriate robotic perception and control mechanisms, developing models of interaction through automatic coding of behaviors and evaluation by human subjects, and validating the models in embodied human-robot interaction. We apply this approach in the context of shadow puppeteering, a constrained interaction space which allows us to study the foundational elements of synchronous interaction and apply them to a robot. We contribute to both social and computer sciences by combining the study of human social interaction with the design of socially responsive robot control algorithms.