The Social Context of Human-Robot Interactions

Sydney Thompson*, Kate Candon*, Marynel Vázquez

*Both authors contributed equally to this work

Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, 9. 2025

Link to paper

The Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community often highlights the social context of an interaction as a key consideration when designing, implementing, and evaluating robot behavior. Unfortunately, researchers use the term ``social context'' in varied ways. This can lead to miscommunication, making it challenging to draw connections between related work on understanding and modeling the social contexts of human-robot interactions. To address this gap, we survey the HRI literature for existing definitions and uses of the term ``social context''. Then, we propose a conceptual model for describing the social context of a human-robot interaction. We apply this model to existing work, and we discuss a range of attributes of social contexts that can help researchers plan for interactions, develop behavior models for robots, and gain insights after interactions have taken place. We conclude with a discussion of open research questions in relation to understanding and modeling the social contexts of human-robot interactions.