Defining Interaction as Coordination Benefits both HRI Research and Robot Development: Entering Service Interactions*

In this position paper, I argue that both HRI academia and robot developers can profit from defining interaction as coordination. Viewing human-robot interactions as instances of coordination provides not only a novel starting point for the evaluation of interactions, but also a practical tool for robot development. Using the example of the development of a service robot application, I show that an approach that puts interaction as coordination first provides an easy access to interaction design and defines clear goals. Furthermore, I argue that ethnomethodological conversation analysis constitutes a rigorous analytical tool to study the extent to which a given robot is able to achieve coordination at various levels, thus providing opportunities for HRI research and evaluation.