Robots are already in wide use in industrial settings where the interactions with people are well structured and stable. Interactions with robots in home settings are notoriously more difficult. The context of interactions changes over time, depending on the people present, the time of day, the event going on, etc. In order to cope with all these factors creating uncertainty and ambiguity people use practices, norms, conventions, etc. to normalize and package certain interactions into standard types of actions performed in order by the parties involved. E.g. getting coffee.

Within this project we explored how the idea of social practices to regulate interactions and create expectations in the parties involved can be used to guide robots in their interactions with people. We explore a simple scenario with a Pepper robot to explore all practical obstacles when using these concepts in robotics.