"If you believe what you see in science fiction movies, human-like robots are just around the corner---if not already operational in secret research labs. The truth is, though robots are common in manufacturing and industry today, they do not interact directly with humans. For safety reasons, most robots operate inside cages or in restricted areas. If human-like robots are ever going to move freely among us in a broad range of situations (assisting the handicapped and elderly, conducting search-and-rescue operations, or playing roles in sales and entertainment), we will need to do more than make them safer; we will need to understand how to program them to collaborate with us smoothly and naturally." – Engagement and Collaboration in Human-Robot Interaction.

Mel explores "engagement behaviors in the context of what we called “hosting.” A robot host guides a human, or groups of humans, around an environment (such as a museum or a store), tells them about the environment, and supervises their interaction with. objects in the environment. Hosting is form of collaboration and companionship aimed primarily at information sharing rather than long-term relationship building. Mel implemented algorithms for initiating, maintaining, and terminating engagement in spoken dialogues with a human collaborator. Mel tracked the human’s face and gaze and, when it was appropriate, looked at and pointed to shared objects relevant to the conversation. Mel also produced and recognized head nods. Mel could converse about himself, participate in a collaborative demonstration of a device, as well as locate a person in an office environment and initiate an interaction with that person." – Robots and Avatars as Hosts, Advisors, Companions, and Jesters, by Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner

"Services are actively provided by an appealing and affordable mobile robot platform. The platform is a two wheels robotic base, with a structured body and robotic head with several integrated sensors. The robot’s height is 125 cm in order to be socially acceptable and dynamically stable. This enables to fulfil the goal of promoting the interaction between the elderly, family, friends, and carers supported by the robotic platform and the SoCoNet." – SocialRobot: An Interactive Mobile Robot for Elderly Home Care.

SERROKON-D, "is aimed at the development of a demonstrator of a mobile interactive shopping assistant. This service robot will serve customers of a home store (DIY market) as mobile information kiosk, guiding the customer to the locations of desired articles. Major work packages include refinement of the robot hardware (drive, sensor equipment, controller, design), enhancements of the algorithms for robot navigation and human-robot interaction, re-design of the robot control architecture, and comprehensive field experiments to evaluate the overall functionality of the shopping assistant. Finally, the service robot should be able to operate within its application environment for longer duration (a couple of days, several weeks)." – SERROKON-D.

"During its operation of 159 days from May 15 to October 20, 2002, the Robox autonomously guided visitors through the Robotics Pavilion at the Swiss National Exhibition Expo.02, up to 12 hours per day, seven days a week. Throughout this period, 686,000 people were in contact with a personal robot for the first time in their life. … The face includes two eyes with independently actuated pan-tilt units and mechanically coupled eyebrows. The right eye is equipped with a Firewire color camera for people tracking. The left eye contains a LED matrix to display symbols and icons. A high quality speech synthesizer enables the robot to speak in the four required languages. The central input device enabling a bi-directional communication with the visitors are four buttons which allow selecting the language, responding to questions the robot asks, and other types of actions. Two of the 11 Robox are additionally equipped with a directional microphone matrix for speech recognition. Although speaker-independent speech recognition in four languages in an exhibition-like context is not possible today, on-site experiments demonstrated the feasibility of recognizing simple words like yes and no in four languages." – Robox at Expo.02: A large-scale installation of personal robots, by Roland Siegwart et al.