Interactional Structure Applied to the Identification and Interpretation of Visual Interactive Behaviour: Robots that (Usually) Follow the Rules

This chapter outlines the application of interactional structures observed by various researchers to the development of artificial interactive agents. The original work from which these structures are drawn has been carried out by researchers in a range of fields including anthropology, sociology and social psychology: the ‘local approach’ described in this paper draws particularly on conversation analysis. We briefly discuss the application of heuristics derived from this work to the development of an interaction trackingsy stem and, in more detail, discuss the use of this work in the development of an architecture for generating action for an interactive agent.