Comedy, theatre, and the arts, broadly, – are disciplines with practices that may benefit the
development of everyday robots. These fields have expertise in repeatably conveying
character, motivations, and relationships to a human audience. The entertainment industry
also offers venues for deploying robots, collecting data from large numbers of people at a
time, which is especially pragmatic in times when research funding may be challenging. My
work – now situated in the CHARISMA Lab – has used these methods in experimental
protocols with robots and human subjects for over a decade. (The street can also be a stage,
anything to get robots out of “the lab.”)

CHARISMA stands for Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine
learning and Art. We develop robot behavioral software and interfaces that take humans into
account as informed by the arts.