Implementation of Social practices on the Pepper Robot in the Elderly Care Domain : AI Planning with social practices

Abstract: Social practices are acceptable ways of doing things, contextual and materially mediated, shared between actors, and routinized over time. These social practices are interactions and can be used to define rule protocols those drive human-robot interactions. We follow these practices in our day-to-day life in almost all the interactions with other people. Social practices also allow computer scientists to model human computer interactions. Human interactions are very dynamic and so the social practices and they naturally follow some versions. Even though they might deviate from pre-specified patterns they will usually expect to follow the general flow of a social practice and adapt it to a specific circumstances. Now we wanted to take these social practices and apply them in a human-robot-interactions setup by choosing a more applicable scenario for the definition of social practices. In our case a simple scenario in elderly care. More specifically, we want to show how these social practices influence the way AI planning in a Pepper robot in the elderly care setting. Given a specific representation of Social Practices we show how the elements of the Social Practice are used in the planning process. We then show briefly how this plan is executed on the Pepper robot in the scenario. We briefly touch on the hardware aspect of the Pepper robot’s API and the inclusion of external APIs to make it for better results. We design and implement the social practices on Pepper robot and conduct experiments and present the results here.