This special issue is made up of five articles which cover the emerging area of human-robot interaction. The first paper offers a theoretical ecological framework for the design of personal service robots in homes of elderly people. Next, a field study of two robots that visited a children's elementary school in Japan for two weeks, with the purpose of teaching children English, is presented. The third article reports on an opportunistic field study of search and rescue robots used as part of a night rescue training exercise. A different perspective on human-computer interaction for search...