David V. Lu, Annamaria Pileggi, Chris Wilson, and William D. Smart. What Can Actors Teach Robots About Interaction? In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium: It’s All In the Timing: Representing and Reading About Time in Interactive Behavior, Palo Alto, CA, March 2010.

[link] – [workshop] – [bibtex]

@inproceedings{lu2010actors,
  title = {{What Can Actors Teach Robots About Interaction?}},
  author = {Lu, David V. and Pileggi, Annamaria and Wilson, Chris and Smart, William D.},
  year = {2010},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium: It's All In the Timing: Representing and Reading About Time in Interactive Behavior},
  address = {Palo Alto, CA},
  month = {March}
}

Ishiguro Hiroshi and Hirata Oriza at Osaka University have gotten a bit of press for their production of “I, Worker”, a play in which two human actors interact with two Wakamaru robots.

In the play, the two robots work for the two humans, and one robot begins to question its lot in life. The play seems to raise some interesting philosophical questions, such that in addition to being an interesting human-robot interaction, it discusses human-robot interaction in a separate context too.

Robots Perform Shakespeare

At Texas A&M there was a production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream that used robot helicopters as fairies. From the videos linked to in the article above, its an interesting effect, although the robots did not have any lines. But they did interact with the actors and definitely added to the ambiance of the scene.

I’d say it was the best “casting” of robots that I’ve seen in a play thus far.