Introduction to the inaugural issue

The intertwining of people and robots is at the very heart of human-robot interaction. The design of effective human-robot interactions depends not only upon an elegant and thorough engineering design for the robot's behavior, but also a clear and insightful understanding of how the human user is likely to behave toward the robot. This presents a challenge and an opportunity for engaging robotics systems research with the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences. Without a deeper understanding of human user contexts, real user needs, and an ability to evaluate a robotic system's performance in terms of user needs, robotics runs the risk of inventing technologies for the sake of the technologies themselves. Without a thorough understanding of the state-of-the-art in robotics, user research runs the risk of generating superficial or irrelevant recommendations for robotic system design.