Benchmarks for evaluating human-robot interaction: lessons learned from human-animal interactions

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is fundamentally concerned with studying the interaction between humans and robots. While it is still a relatively young field, it can draw inspiration from other disciplines studying human interaction with other types of agents. Often, such inspiration is sought from the study of human-computer interaction (HCI) and the social sciences studying human-human interaction (HHI). More rarely, the field also turns to human-animal interaction (HAI).In this paper, we identify two distinct underlying motivations for making such comparisons: to form a target to recreate or to obtain a benchmark (or baseline) for evaluation. We further highlight relevant (existing) overlap between HRI and HAI, and identify specific themes that are of particular interest for further trans-disciplinary exploration. At the same time, since robots and animals are clearly not the same, we also discuss important differences between HRI and HAI, their complementarity notwithstanding. The overall purpose of this discussion is thus to create an awareness of the potential mutual benefit between the two disciplines and to describe opportunities that exist for future work, both in terms of new domains to explore, and existing results to learn from.