  While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a
lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress
in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair
of computational models to guide a robot as it provides social assistance. The
model of social autonomy helps a robot select an appropriate assistance that
will help with the task at hand while also maintaining the autonomy of the
person being assisted. The model of social alliance describes how a to
determine whether the robot and the person being assisted are cooperatively
working towards the same goal. Each of these models are rooted in social
reasoning between people, and we describe here our ongoing work to adapt this
social reasoning to human-robot interactions.
