In modern daily life, people envision a closer relationship with human-like machine that is able to communicate socially with human. The relationship between machine and the human draws interdisciplinary studies on both sides. Recently, robots tend to be extended from industrial factories into the advanced technological domains such as rescue, scientific exploration, entertainment, hospital care, etc. This implies a closer interaction with the user. The applications require not only state-of-the-art technology to improve robot functionality and utility but also new theoretical model to evaluate the risks and benefits for human society. Therefore, the field of HRI has been steadily grown with methodical and scientific studies.

Game is a structured entertainment tool for enjoyment. The people factor of game that creates opportunities of social experience such as competition, teamwork, social bonding and personal recognition plays an important role in either developing card playing robots as a social partner in human-robot interaction field. It is a grand challenge to develop a poker playing humanoid that is able to understand human interactions and socially respond to human in a poker game as well as establish game strategies and predict opponent decisions.

On the engineering side, vision and auditory software modules have been implemented on the humanoid robot platform. Also to play the game with real poker cards, the humanoid uses its arm and hand by following the prescripted motions. From scientific perspective, the human nonverbal response and bluffing decision in the human-humanoid poker game has been studied in comparison with human-human poker game. Effects of the presence of an opponent and card hand strength on human bluff decision and nonverbal response were studied.