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This study deals with turn-taking in human-robot interactions (HRI). Based on 15 sessions of video-recorded interactions between pairs of human participants and a social robot called Furhat, we explore how human participants orient to violations of the normative order of turn-taking in social interaction and how they handle those violations. As a case in point, we present sequences of HRI to show particular features of turn-taking with the robot and also how the robot may fail to respond to the human participants’ bid to take a turn. In these sequences, the participants either complete the turn in progress and ignore the overlap caused by the robot’s continuation of its turn, or they cut short their own turn and restart in the next possible turn-transition place. In all cases in our data, the overlaps and failed smooth turn-transitions are oriented to as accountable and in some sense interactionally problematic. The results of the study point not only to improvables in robot engineering, but also to routine practices of projection and the ways in which human subjects orient toward normative expectations of ordinary social interactions, even when conversing with a robot.

Our work is motivated by the idea that social robots can help inclusive processes in groups of children, focusing on the case of children who have newly arrived from a foreign country and their peers at school. Building on an initial study where we tested different robot behaviours and recorded children’s interactions mediated by a robot in a game, we present in this paper the findings from a subsequent analysis of the same video data drawing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We describe how this approach differs from predominantly quantitative video analysis in HRI; how mutual gaze appeared as a challenging interactional accomplishment between unacquainted children, and why we focused on this phenomenon. We identify two situations and trajectories in which children make eye contact: asking for or giving instructions, and sharing an emotional reaction. Based on detailed analyses of a selection of extracts in the empirical section, we describe patterns and discuss the links between the different situations and trajectories, and relationship building. Our findings inform HRI and robot design by identifying complex interactional accomplishments between two children, as well as group dynamics which support these interactions. We argue that social robots should be able to perceive such phenomena in order to better support inclusion of outgroup children. Lastly, by explaining how we combined approaches and showing how they build on each other, we also hope to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research, and encourage it.