Designing Social Robots to Accommodate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Human-Robot Interaction

As humanoid robots interact with people in social contexts, it is important to design robots that meet the information needs and values of a diverse group of users. This is an emerging topic of interest for researchers in information sciences because robots displaying social skills are beginning to assist users in their search for, retrieval, and access to information. However, current robots designed in the United States, Europe, and Asia, may not reflect the values and diversity of the users expected to interact with robots and thus may not be inclusive for Hispanic, Muslim, and other user populations. With this observation in mind, and drawing on Social Identity Theory, my research is aimed at extending past studies on social categorization of individuals to the domain of human-robot interaction and done in the context of information search and retrieval, and other applied tasks. For this relatively unexplored topic of research, I aim to develop guidelines for the design of human-robot interfaces that are inclusive and thus accommodate the diversity of users expected to interact with social robots.