Toward sociable robots

Connection Science, 2010

This article investigates the role of interaction kinesics in human-robot interaction (HRI). We adopted a bottom-up, synthetic approach towards interactive competencies in robots using simple, minimal computational models underlying the robot's interaction dynamics. We present two empirical, exploratory studies investigating a drumming experience with a humanoid robot (KASPAR) and a human. In the first experiment, the turn-taking behaviour of the humanoid is deterministic and the non-verbal gestures of the robot accompany its drumming to assess the impact of non-verbal gestures on the interaction. The second experiment studies a computational framework that facilitates emergent turn-taking dynamics, whereby the particular dynamics of turn-taking emerge from the social interaction between the human and the humanoid. The results from the HRI experiments are presented and analysed qualitatively (in terms of the participants' subjective experiences) and quantitatively (concerning the drumming performance of the human-robot pair). The results point out a trade-off between the subjective evaluation of the drumming experience from the perspective of the participants and the objective evaluation of the drumming performance. A certain number of gestures was preferred as a motivational factor in the interaction. The participants preferred the models underlying the robot's turn-taking which enable the robot and human to interact more and provide turn-taking closer to 'natural' human-human conversations, despite differences in objective measures of drumming behaviour. The results are consistent with the temporal behaviour matching hypothesis previously proposed in the literature which concerns the effect that the participants adapt their own interaction dynamics to the robot's. H. Kose-Bagci et al. of the human-robot pair in a task-based scenario, as well as in terms of the user's subjective experience of the interaction. Intuitively one may assume that what matters in human-human interaction should also matter in human-machine interaction. And indeed, research by Nass and his colleagues (e.g. has shown that people treat interactive artefacts socially. However, robots and computers are not exactly like people and it remains open when and to what extent models and theories of human-human interaction are directly applicable to HRI (Dautenhahn 2007b).

Handbook of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, 2010

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) brings new challenges to robotics. We focus in this paper on the decisional issues of HRI enabled robots. We propose a control architecture specifically designed for HRI and present an implemented system that illustrates its main components and their interaction. These components provide integrated abilities to support human-robot collaborative task achievement as well as capacities to elaborate task plans involving humans and robots and to produce legible and socially acceptable behavior.

Human Communication Research, 2005

We discuss implications of the current study on human-robot interaction, the computers are social actors (CASA) paradigm, and the study of (tele)presence.

Journal of Communication, 2006

Personality is an essential feature for creating socially interactive robots. Studies on this dimension will facilitate enhanced human-robot interaction (HRI). Using AIBO, a social robotic pet developed by Sony, we examined the issue of personality in HRI. In this gender-balanced 2 (AIBO personality: introvert vs. extrovert) by 2 (participant personality: introvert vs. extrovert) between-subject experiment (N = 48), we found that participants could accurately recognize a robot's personality based on its verbal and nonverbal behaviors. In addition, various complementarity attraction effects were found in HRI. Participants enjoyed interacting with a robot more when the robot's personality was complementary to their own personalities than when the robot's personality was similar to their own personalities. The same complementarity attraction effect was found in participants' evaluation of the robot's intelligence and social attraction. Participants' feelings of social presence during the interaction were a significant mediator for the complementarity attraction effects observed. Practical and theoretical implications of the current study for the design of social robots and the study of HRI were discussed.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2015

To interact and cooperate with humans in their daily-life activities, robots should exhibit human-like "intelligence". This skill will substantially emerge from the interconnection of all the algorithms used to ensure cognitive and interaction capabilities. While new robotics technologies allow us to extend such abilities, their evaluation for social interaction is still challenging. The quality of a humanrobot interaction can not be reduced to the evaluation of the employed algorithms: we should integrate the engagement information that naturally arises during interaction in response to the robot's behaviors. In this paper we want to show a practical approach to evaluate the engagement aroused during interactions between humans and social B Salvatore M. Anzalone robots. We will introduce a set of metrics useful in direct, face to face scenarios, based on the behaviors analysis of the human partners. We will show how such metrics are useful to assess how the robot is perceived by humans and how this perception changes according to the behaviors shown by the social robot. We discuss experimental results obtained in two human-interaction studies, with the robots Nao and iCub respectively.

CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '05, 2005

This study investigated the interactions of 72 children (ages 7 to 15) with Sony's robotic dog AIBO in comparison to a live Australian Shepherd dog. Results showed that more children conceptualized the live dog, as compared to AIBO, as having physical essences, mental states, sociality, and moral standing. Based on behavioral analyses, children also spent more time touching and within arms distance of the live dog, as compared to AIBO. That said, a surprising majority of children conceptualized and interacted with AIBO in ways that were like a live dog. Discussion focuses on two questions. First, is it possible that a new technological genre is emerging in HCI that challenges traditional ontological categories (e.g., between animate and inanimate)? Second, are pervasive interactions with a wide array of "robotic others" -increasingly sophisticated personified computational artifacts that mimic biological forms and pull psychologically in mental, social, and moral ways -a good thing for human beings?

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2004

Worldwide the pros and cons of games and social behaviour are discussed. In Western countries the discussion is focussing on violent game and media content; in Japan on intensive game usage and the impact on the intellectual development of children. A lot is already discussed on the harmful and negative effects of entertainment technology on human behaviour, therefore we decided to focus primarily on the positive effects. Based on an online document search we could find and select 393 online available publications according the following categories: meta review (N=34), meta analysis (N=13), literature review (N=38), literature survey (N=36), empirical study (N=91), survey study (N=44), design study (N=91), any other document (N=46). In this paper a first preliminary overview over positive effects of entertainment technology on human behaviour is presented and discussed. The drawn recommendations can support developers and designers in entertainment industry.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2010

Understanding how people perceive robot gestures will aid the design of robots capable of social interaction with humans. We examined the generation and perception of a restricted form of gesture in a robot capable of simple head and arm movement, referring to point-light animation and video experiments in human motion to derive our hypotheses. Four studies were conducted to look at the effects of situational context, gesture complexity, emotional valence and author expertise. In Study 1, four participants created gestures with corresponding emotions based on 12 scenarios provided. The resulting gestures were judged by 12 participants in a second study. Participants' recognition of emotion was better than chance and improved when situational context was provided. Ratings of lifelikeness were found to be related to the number of arm movements (but not head movements) in a gesture. In Study 3, five novices and five puppeteers created gestures conveying Ekman's six basic emotions which were shown to 12 Study 4 participants. Puppetry experience improved identification rates only for the emotions of fear and disgust, possibly because of limitations with the robot's movement. The results demonstrate the communication of emotion by a social robot capable of only simple head and arm movement.

Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, 2011

While we are capable of modeling the shape, e.g. face, arms, etc. of humanoid robots in a nearly natural or humanlike way, it is much more di cult to generate human-like facial or body movements and human-like behavior like e.g. speaking and co-speech gesturing. In this paper it will be argued for a developmental robotics approach for learning to speak. On the basis of current literature a blueprint of a brain model will be outlined for this kind of robots and preliminary scenarios for knowledge acquisition will be described. Furthermore it will be illustrated that natural speech acquisition mainly results from learning during face-to-face communication and it will be argued that learning to speak should be based on human-robot face-to-face communication. Here the human acts like a caretaker or teacher and the robot acts like a speech-acquiring toddler. This is a fruitful basic scenario not only for learning to speak, but also for learning to communicate in general, including to produce co-verbal manual gestures and to produce co-verbal facial expressions.

Communication Studies, 2015

As social robotics becomes more utilized and routine in everyday situations, individuals will be interacting with social robots in a variety of contexts. Centered on the use of human-to-human interaction scripts, the current study hypothesized that individuals would be more uncertain, have less liking and anticipate less social presence when they are told that they will be interacting with a social robot as opposed to another person. Additionally, the current study utilized a two-time measurement model experiment to explore perceptions of interacting with either a robot or human. Data were consistent with hypotheses. Research questions examined perceptions from Time 1 to Time 2 for the robot condition on the dependent variables. Findings are discussed in light of future research studies.

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2006

Research of autonomous mobile robots has mostly emphasized interaction and coordination that are natually inspired from biological behavior of birds, insects, and fish: flocking, foraging, collecting, and sharing. However, most research has been only focused on autonomous behaviors in order to perform robots like animals, whereas it is lacked of determinant to those behaviours: energy. Approaching to clusted amimal and the higher, collective and sharing food among individuals are major activity to keep society being. This paper issues an approach to sociable robots using self-maintained energy in cooperative mobile robots, which is dominantly inspired from swarm behavior of collecting and sharing food of honey-bee and ant. Autonomous mobile robots are usually equipped with a finite energy, thus they can operate in a finite time. To overcome the finitude, we describe practical deployment of mobile robots that are capable of carrying and exchanging fuel to other robots. Mechanism implementation including modular hardware and control architecture to demonstrate the capabicities of the approach is presented. Subsequently, the battery exchange algorithm basically based on probabilistic modeling of total energy on each robot located in its local vicinity is described. The paper is concluded with challenging works of chain of mobile robots, rescue, repair, and relation of heterogeneous robots.

Autonomous Robots, 2007

We describe a novel method whereby a particle filter is used to create a potential field for robot control without prior clustering. We show an application of this technique to control a team of mobile robots to cooperatively locate and track a moving target. The particle filter models a probability distribution over the estimated location of the target, providing robust tracking despite frequent target occlusion. This method extends previous work in particle-filter-based tracking in two important ways. First, the particle cloud is never clustered to find a single estimate of target location. Instead, robot motion is guided by a potential field generated directly from the particle cloud. Secondly, effective coordinated multi-robot searching and tracking can be achieved by simply assigning a subset of the particles to each robot. Simulation trials and real robot experiments demonstrate the method successfully locating and tracking targets, and experiments show that multiple coordinated robots outperform a similar but uncoordinated team.

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

COVID-19 has impacted not only the health of citizens, but also the various factors that make up our society, living environments, and ecosystems. This pandemic has shown that future living will need to be agile and flexible to adapt to the various changes in needs of societal populations. Digital technology has played an integral role during COVID-19, assisting various sectors of the community, and demonstrating that smart cities can provide opportunities to respond to many future societal challenges. In the decades ahead, the rise in aging populations will be one of these challenges, and one in which the needs and requirements between demographic cohorts will vary greatly. Although we need to create future smart age-friendly ecosystems to meet these needs, technology still does not feature in the WHO eight domains of an age-friendly city. This paper extends upon Marston and van Hoof’s ‘Smart Age-friendly Ecosystem’ (SAfE) framework, and explores how digital technology, design hack...

International Journal of Social Robotics

Stage plays, theories of theatre, narrative studies, and robotics research can serve to identify, explore, and interrogate theatrical elements that support the effective performance of sociable humanoid robots. Theatre, including its parts of performance, aesthetics, character, and genre, can also reveal features of human–robot interaction key to creating humanoid robots that are likeable rather than uncanny. In particular, this can be achieved by relating Mori's (1970/2012) concept of total appearance to realism. Realism is broader and more subtle in its workings than is generally recognised in its operationalization in studies that focus solely on appearance. For example, it is complicated by genre. A realistic character cast in a detective drama will convey different qualities and expectations than the same character in a dystopian drama or romantic comedy. The implications of realism and genre carry over into real life. As stage performances and robotics studies reveal, like...

Envisioning Social Robotics, 2020

This paper discusses social robotics as a hybrid knowledge space that encourages interaction and collaboration among many different disciplines: engineering, computer science, the social sciences and humanities, design, the arts, etc. Such collaboration in the design of socio-culturally situated artifacts poses many challenges, occassioned by differences in conceptual frameworks, methods for conducting research, and even daily work practices. By approaching these challenges in a spirit of friendship across the sciences, it is possible to achieve transdisciplinary understanding and reap the benefits of applying different, yet complementary, forms of expertise to social robot design. In this paper, we use insights and lessons learned from our own collaborative experiences to discuss how social as well as technical and design issues are addressed in the construction and evaluation of social robots and how the boundaries between the social, natural, and applied sciences are challenged, redefined, and traversed.

European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

Information Systems Frontiers

When robots are used as part of meaningful play, for example to enhance wellbeing, they can be considered "serious toys". Our study examines the potential of robotic pet toys viewed as companions, which activate social and emotional experiences of the elderly by increasing their wellbeing. In order to study the benefits of using Golden Pup, a commercial robot dog, we designed and performed a research intervention at a senior day activity center with 10 participants of ages 65-80+ years who were joined by a playful group of preschoolers. In this study, we were mainly interested in the firsthand user experiences.This study suggests how robotic pets can be used to activate the social and emotional experiences of elderly, and illustrated the role of building a relationship with a robotic pet. We present novel results on how a robot dog with a natural interface (NUI) may be used to evoke social and emotional experiences in older adults as part of playful, intergenerational group activities.

Artificial Intelligence Review, 2012

A great number of computational models of emotions (CMEs) have been developed to be included in, or as part of, cognitive agent architectures. These computational models have been designed to provide autonomous agents with appropriate mechanisms for the processing of emotional stimuli, the elicitation of synthetic emotions, and the generation of emotional responses. The research on CMEs has allowed for improvements in several application domains and contributed to progress in areas such as human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, despite the wide variety of CMEs proposed in the literature and their success in multiple areas, the complexity and quality of current and future human-centered applications require the development of more flexible and robust CMEs. In this sense, CMEs have yet to face a series of challenges in order to meet such types of requirements. In this paper, we explore key aspects of the development and applications of CMEs for autonomous agents, discuss four major challenges facing their development process, and present a novel approach to deal with these challenges. Keywords Emotions • Computational modeling • Agent architectures • Affective agents 1 Introduction The multidisciplinary study of human emotions has led to the formulation of a great volume of theories and models that explain the various facets of this human function. These theories suggest that emotions play an important role in the development of rational behavior in humans and that experiencing and expressing them are essential for survival purposes. According to Damasio (1994) and Loewenstein and Lerner (2003), emotions influence human cognitive

International Journal of Social Robotics

Many social robots have emerged in public places to serve people. For these services, the robots are assumed to be able to present internal aspects (i.e., mind, sociability) to engage and interact with people over the long term. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue structure called experience-based dialogue to help a robot present and maintain a good interaction over the long term. This dialogue structure contains a piece of knowledge and a story about how the robot gained this knowledge, which are used to compose the robot's experience-related utterances for sharing experiences of interacting with previous users other than just the current user and help it present its internal aspects. We conducted an experiment to test the effects of our proposed dialogue structure and measure them with some published subjective scales. The results showed that experience-based dialogue can help a robot obtain better evaluations in terms of perceived intelligence, sociability, mind, anthropomorphism, animacy, likability, level of acceptance, and positive user reaction.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

The field of social robotics offers an unprecedented opportunity to probe the process of impression formation and the effects of identity-based stereotypes (e.g. about gender or race) on social judgements and interactions. We present the concept of fair proxy communication—a form of robot-mediated communication that proceeds in the absence of potentially biasing identity cues—and describe how this application of social robotics may be used to illuminate implicit bias in social cognition and inform novel interventions to reduce bias. We discuss key questions and challenges for the use of robots in research on the social cognition of bias and offer some practical recommendations. We conclude by discussing boundary conditions of this new form of interaction and by raising some ethical concerns about the inclusion of social robots in psychological research and interventions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to...

Computing

Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and p...

Motivation and Emotion

The aim of this paper is to present a study in which we compare the degree of empathy that a convenience sample of university students expressed with humans, animals, robots and objects. The present study broadens the spectrum of elements eliciting empathy that has been previously explored while at the same time comparing different facets of empathy. Here we used video clips of mistreated humans, animals, robots, and objects to elicit empathic reactions and to measure attributed emotions. The use of such a broad spectrum of elements allowed us to infer the role of different features of the selected elements, specifically experience (how much the element is able to understand the events of the environment) and degree of anthropo-/zoomorphization. The results show that participants expressed empathy differently with the various social actors being mistreated. A comparison between the present results and previous results on vicarious feelings shows that congruence between self and othe...

Breaking Down Barriers, 2018

For almost two decades there have been many developments in using intelligent technologies to support older people, with many different terms proposed to describe these technologies including assistive robots, embodied conversational agents and relational agents. Many technologies have been proposed in many different configurations and many assistance roles have been explored. Characteristics of these technologies include tangible or virtual; anthropomorphic, biomorphic, creature or object-like; level of visual realism; paralinguistic abilities; interactivity; adaptability; movement; and positioning. The assistive roles proposed include providing information, advice and reminders, helping with physical tasks, monitoring, providing companionship and emotional support. This paper provides an overview of the characteristics and roles of these technologies and attempts to clarify some of the terminology used. It aims to provide a guide for researchers from the wide range of disciplines working on such technolgoies for supporting older people.

Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Multimodal, Multi-Party, Real-World Human-Robot Interaction - MMRWHRI '14, 2014

The paper describes advances in Wikipedia-based humanrobot interaction. After reviewing the current capabilities of talking robots that use Wikipedia as an information source, the paper presents methods that support new capabilities. These include language-switching and multimodal behaviourswitching when using Wikipedias in many languages, robot initiatives to suggest new topics from Wikipedia based on semantic similarity to the current topic, and the capability of the robot to listen to the user talking and to recognize entities mentioned by the user that have Wikipedia links.

Communication Studies

The way humans and robots interact is no longer in the realm of fiction, because robots have seemingly gained the ability to respond to others, including humans. Communication research can be at the forefront of examining these interactions. This study used a "chatbot"-run by a researcher-to respond to a pre-generated set of questions asked by participants. An experiment varied the presence of typos and capitalized words in the responses. Significant main effects were found for typos in the responses, which had a negative effect on the perceived humanness of the respondent, as well as other perceptions. These findings, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

Ai & Society, 2021

Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human–robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and feminist studies of service work. In this paper, we explore these tensions through the concepts of affective and emotional labor, and outline key insights these concepts offer for the design and evaluation of professional service robots. Taken together, an emphasis on interactionist approaches to emotions and on the demands of affective labor, leads us to argue that service employees are under-represented in existing studies in human–...

AI & SOCIETY, 2020

This article studies perceptual differences of three social robots by elementary school children of ages 6–13 years ( n = 107) at research fairs. The autonomous humanoid robot Pepper , an advanced social robot primarily designed as a personal assistant with movement and mobility, is compared to the teleoperated AV1 robot—designed to help elementary school children who cannot attend school to have a telepresence through the robot—and the flowerpot robot Tessa , used in the eWare system as an avatar for a home sensor system and dedicated to people with dementia living alone. These three robots were shown at the Norwegian national research fair, held in every major Norwegian city annually, where children were able to interact with the robots. Our analysis is based on quantitative survey data of the school children concerning the robots and qualitative discussions with them. By comparing three different types of social robots, we found that presence can be differently understood and co...

2020

This study contributes to the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR). We focus our research on the perception and projections of SAR and the interconnections between their tasks, roles, appearances, and behaviors. We explore how humanoid and non-humanoid appearance and behavior influence people’s expectations and roles they give to robots. We also tackle broader questions related to projections, identification, and interpretations of SAR in everyday life. Regarding robots’ roles, first studies on the “robotic etiquette” showed that older population saw companion robots as butlers, disabled people see robots as assistants, and only young participants gave roles as being a friend. Even if SAR has as main goal the rehabilitation or medical care, the devices built in this field will also enter people’s homes. Based on appearance and intention scenarios of human-robot experiences, design researchers propose opportunities of projection and discussions and push the human-robot interact...

Human-Robot Interaction - Theory and Application, 2018

Long-term companionship, emotional attachment and realistic interaction with robots have always been the ultimate sign of technological advancement projected by sci-fi literature and entertainment industry. With the advent of artificial intelligence, we have indeed stepped into an era of socially believable robots or humanoids. Affective computing has enabled the deployment of emotional or social robots to a certain level in social settings like informatics, customer services and health care. Nevertheless, social believability of a robot is communicated through its physical embodiment and natural expressiveness. With each passing year, innovations in chemical and mechanical engineering have facilitated lifelike embodiments of robotics; however, still much work is required for developing a "social intelligence" in a robot in order to maintain the illusion of dealing with a real human being. This chapter is a collection of research studies on the modeling of complex autonomous systems. It will further shed light on how different social settings require different levels of social intelligence and what are the implications of integrating a socially and emotionally believable machine in a society driven by behaviors and actions.

Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2020

Following affective turn in cognitive science, recent decades have witnessed an increasing interest toward the role of emotions in education. Ample evidence suggests that learners and teachers experience a variety of emotions, ranging from joy and pride to anger and frustration. However, when it comes to the design of affective behavior in robotic systems for education purposes, the emphasis has been predominantly on communication of positive emotions. While we recognize that positive emotions are fundamental to successful learning, in this paper we wish to make the case for the consideration of ambivalent emotions for the design of social robots for tutoring. To ground this proposal, we focus on the emotion of teachers' disappointment. First, we discuss under which conditions communicated teachers' disappointment, while it may be experienced as emotionally ambivalent by teachers and students, functions as an affiliating pedagogical strategy. We proceed to sketch out the methodological suggestions we consider relevant for future studies of communicated disappointment in human-robot interactions within learning contexts. We conclude with critical reflections about the ethics of responsible designs of such studies. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Education; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms.

Robotics

Understanding user perceptions is particularly important in developing social robots, which tend to have a high degree of interaction with humans. However, psychometric measures of robot acceptability have only recently started to become available. The present critical review outlines the psychometrically validated questionnaires to measure social acceptability factors related to social robots. Using an iterative search strategy, articles were identified that reported on the development of such questionnaires as well as information about their psychometric properties. Six questionnaires were identified that provide researchers with options varying in length, content, and factor structure. Two of these questionnaires inquire about attitudes and anxieties related to robots, while two others capture a larger range of attitudes that extends to positive and neutral aspects as well. One of the questionnaires reviewed here was specific to inquiring about ethical issues related to the use o...

Journal of Service Management, 2018

Purpose The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature. Findings The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for...

Minds and Machines, 2021

Social robots are robots that can interact socially with humans. As social robots and the artificial intelligence (AI) that powers them becomes more advanced, they will likely take on more social and work roles. This has many important ethical implications. In this paper, we focus on one of the most central of these, the impacts that social robots can have on human autonomy. We argue that, due to their physical presence and social capacities, there is a strong potential for social robots to enhance human autonomy as well as several ways they can inhibit and disrespect it. We argue that social robots could improve human autonomy by helping us to achieve more valuable ends, make more authentic choices, and improve our autonomy competencies. We also argue that social robots have the potential to harm human autonomy by instead leading us to achieve fewer valuable ends ourselves, make less authentic choices, decrease our autonomy competencies, make our autonomy more vulnerable, and disre...

SHS Web of Conferences, 2022

This study intends to utilize eye tracking for the appearance of a robot, which is one of the trends in social robot design research. We suggest a research model with the entire stage from the consumer gaze response to the perceived consumer beliefs and further their attitudes toward social robots. Specifically, the eye tracking indicators used in this study are Fixation, First Visit, Total Viewed Stay Time, and Number of Revisits. Also, Areas of Interest are selected to the face, eyes, lips, and full-body of a social robot. In the first relationship, we check which element of the social robot design the consumer’s gaze stays on, and how the gaze on each element affects consumer beliefs. The consumer beliefs are considered as the social robot’s emotional expression, humanness, and facial prominence. Second, we explore whether the formation of consumer attitudes is possible through two major channels. One is the path that the consumer beliefs formed through the gaze influence their a...

Modelling Human Motion, 2020

Human motion understanding has been studied for decades but yet it remains a challenging research field which attracts the interest from different disciplines. This book wants to provide a comprehensive view on this topic, closing the loop between perception and action, starting from humans' action perception skills and then moving to computational models of motion perception and control adopted in robotics. To achieve this aim, the book collects contributions from experts in different fields, spanning neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. The first part focuses on the features of human motion perception and its neural underpinnings. The second part considers motion perception from the computational perspective, providing a view on cutting-edge machine learning solutions. Finally, the third part takes into account the implications for robotics, exploring how motion and gestures should be generated by communicative artificial agents to establish intuitive and effective human-robot interaction.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2011

Interactive distances between children and STB.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

This paper reports on a children-dependent robotic approach to establish asynchronous child assistance with a social rapport network for the purpose of collecting trash from a public space. Our sociable trash box robot (STB) was unable to collect trash by itself. However, it did succeed in conveying its intentions to collect the trash from children. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effective social cues, behaviors, and other essential factors to facilitate children in their anticipation of the behavior of a sociable trash box robot. The STB engages by using interactive social cues and vocal interactions to build a social coupling with children in order to induce their assistance in collecting trash. We discuss the minimalism designing mechanism of the STB, as well as the effectiveness of the above factors through an experiment which is conducted in a child-centric environment.

2021

Services are intangible in nature and as a result, it is often difficult to measure the quality of the service. In the service literature, the service is usually delivered by a human to a human customer and the quality of the service is often evaluated using the SERVQUAL dimensions. An extensive review of the literature shows there is a lack of an empirical model to assess the perceived service quality provided by a social robot. Furthermore, the social robot literature highlights key differences between human service and social robots. For example, scholars have highlighted the importance of entertainment value and engagement in the adoption of social robots in the service industry. However, it is unclear whether the SERVQUAL dimensions are appropriate to measure social robot's service quality. The paper proposes the SERVBOT model to assess a social robot's service quality. It identifies, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and entertainment as the five dimensions of SERVBOT. Further, the research will investigate how these five factors influence emotional engagement and future intentions to use the social robot in a concierge service setting. The model was tested using student sampling, and a total of 94 responses were collected for the study. The findings indicate empathy and entertainment value as key predictors of emotional engagement. Further, emotional engagement is a strong predictor of future intention to use a social robot in a service setting. This study is the first to propose the SERVBOT model to measure social robot's service quality. The model provides a theoretical underpinning on the key service quality dimensions of a social robot and gives scholars and managers a method to track the service quality of a social robot. The study also extends on the literature by exploring the key factors that influence the use of social robots (i.e. emotional engagement).

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

This paper describes a simple psychological experiment to investigate the effects of two aspects of user interactions with message taking artifacts. The first is the effect of the artifacts' physical appearance, and the other is prior interaction experience. We examined the effect of these two factors on the ability of users to feel comfortable and natural when interacting with the artifacts. Experimental results revealed that prior interaction experience was a much more important factor than the artifacts' appearance in determining whether participants could leave verbal messages smoothly.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2011

We have investigated actual and perceived human performance associated with a simple task involving walking and applied the developed knowledge to a humanrobot interaction. Based on experiments involving walking at a "purposeful and comfortable" pace, parameters were determined for a trapezoidal model of walking: starting from standing still, accelerating to a constant pace, walking at a constant pace, and decelerating to a stop. We also collected data on humans' evaluation of the accomplishment of a simple task involving walking: determining the transitions from having taken too short a period of time to an appropriate time and from having taken an appropriate time to having taken too long. People were found to be accurate in estimating the task duration for short tasks, but to underestimate the duration of longer tasks. This information was applied to a human-robot interaction involving a human leaving for a "moment" and the robot knows how long the task should take and how time is evaluated by a human.

Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 2018

Emerging evidence documents that social robots may increase motivation in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when participating in educational activities. This study reports on the results of a pilot test conducted in a public child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) aimed at exploring whether a social robot could increase engagement and learning achievement in two 9-year-old male children with ASD with accompanying intellectual disability, language and communication impairments, and low adaptive skills. Using an ABA 1 single-case design, children participated in educational sessions targeting developmental and social skills (e.g., motor imitation, expressive/receptive language, spontaneous requests). The results indicated that interacting with a social robot enhanced engagement (d = 0.78) and goal achievement in one case (d = 2.19), and only goal achievement in the second case (d = 2). The results from the present investigation are discussed in light of their implications for the design of a more robust translational research protocol aimed at assessing the effectiveness of robot-based ASD intervention scenarios.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2016

Art installations involving robotic artifacts provide an opportunity to examine human relationships with robots designed solely for the purpose of sustaining evocative behaviours. In an attempt to determine the behavioural characteristics and personality traits attributed by a human to a robotic artifact, we investigated an audience's experience of an installation that presented three robotic artifacts moving autonomously in an exhibition space. In order to describe the audience's experience, we present two studies that revealed the psychological attributions spontaneously produced from observing the robots, and visitors' physical exploration patterns inside the exhibition. We propose a psychological profile for the artwork, and a tentative organization for the attribution process. Using a cluster analysis performed on visitors' trajectories inside the installation, we highlight four different exploration and interaction heuristics characterized by patterns of approach or withdrawal, passive observation and exploration.

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, 2022

Figure 1: The interaction from the eyes of the participants (and the experimenter). Participants were exposed to the robot Pepper (SoftBank Robotics) only via the Zoom chats.

Discover Artificial Intelligence

This article examines the challenges and opportunities that arise when engaging with research across disciplines, contributing to the growth of social robotics and artificially intelligent systems. Artificial intelligence has a significant role to play in human–machine communication; however, there are barriers to its adoption and considerations towards systematic implementation for the good of people and societies. This perspective piece considers the position of artificial intelligence in systems of human–machine communication. The study of artificial intelligent systems is one of discovery, trial, and error through a melting pot of methodologies, and this interdisciplinary nature is explored through the perspective of researchers at the centre of collaboration coming from artificial intelligence, robotics, and communication.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2020

This paper explores the expressive capabilities of a swarm of miniature mobile robots within the context of inter-robot interactions and their mapping to the so-called fundamental emotions. In particular, we investigate how motion and shape descriptors that are psychologically associated with different emotions can be incorporated into different swarm behaviors for the purpose of artistic expositions. Based on these characterizations from social psychology, a set of swarm behaviors is created, where each behavior corresponds to a fundamental emotion. The effectiveness of these behaviors is evaluated in a survey in which the participants are asked to associate different swarm behaviors with the fundamental emotions. The results of the survey show that most of the research participants assigned to each video the emotion intended to be portrayed by design. These results confirm that abstract descriptors associated with the different fundamental emotions in social psychology provide useful motion characterizations that can be effectively transformed into expressive behaviors for a swarm of simple ground mobile robots.

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

What is the role of touch in inviting social interaction with robots? Forms of functional haptics in collaboration and socially assistive robots for example indicate one pathway. But what of more naturalistic and affective forms of touch that are more inviting, that encourage pro-social behaviors? This is a tale of three loops. First, the haptic feedback loop, where human-human touch still remains underexplored, and where human-machine touch is produced through mechanical engineering as ‘force display’ and perceived by the user as tactile (e.g. Srinivasan and Basdogan 1997). Second, the affective feedback loop, courtesy of Höök (2008; 2009) and Dumouchel and Damiano (2017), where technical systems influence, and are influenced by, a human user corporeally. Bringing these loops together encourages interaction design to consider how touch and affect may more effectively invite a range of users to interact with social robots, and their role in the perception of Artificial Empathy (AE).

Cognitive Computation, 2014

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International Journal of Social Robotics, 2021

Children with severe motor impairment due to cerebral palsy have difficulties engaging in play, although they want to play games that typically developing children play. The barriers imposed by motor impairments against engaging in play can be addressed through the use of robots. We aim to identify how children, who have extensive experience of play, imagine what a robot is and what features would make a robot good to play with. Using a qualitative description design, 19 children from urban and rural settings participated in focus groups to draw and talk about the robots they would like to exist. The data were coded and analyzed using a summative approach to content analysis. The findings revealed that the children imagined that a good robot to play with is one that has an anthropomorphic appearance, is tough and strong, has controls, and that is able to move, grab, speak, and play popular children’s games. In particular, the girls imagined that robots should be able to express posi...

Science and Engineering Ethics, 2020

The social impact of robotics applied to domains such as education, religion, nursing, and therapy across the world depends on the level of technology as well as the culture in which it is used. By studying how robots are used in Iran, a technologically-savvy country with a long history and a rich culture, we explore their possible impact on interrelated areas of religious and ethical features in education in an Islamic society. To accomplish this task, a preliminary exploratory study was conducted using two social robots as teaching assistants in Islamic religion classes for 42 elementary students. More than 90% of the participants in the study absolutely preferred the robot-assisted religion class over one taught by a human. Building on the results from the students' viewpoints and exam scores, the acceptability and potential of using social robots in the education of Islamic religious concepts in Iran are further discussed in this paper.

Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2017

In the realms of AI and science fiction, agents are fully-autonomous systems that can be perceived as acting of their own volition to achieve their own goals. But in the real world, the term "agent" more commonly refers to a person that serves as a representative for a human client and works to achieve this client's goals (e.g., lawyers and real estate agents). Yet, until the day that computers become fully autonomous, agents in the first sense are really agents in the second sense as well: computer agents that serve the interests of the human user or corporation they represent. In a series of experiments, we show that human decision-making and fairness is significantly altered when agent representatives are inserted into common social decisions such as the ultimatum game. Similar to how they behave with human representatives, people show less regard for other people (e.g., exhibit more self-interest and less fairness), when the other is represented by an agent. However, in contrast to the human literature, people show more regard for others and increased fairness when "programming" an agent to represent their own interests. This finding confirms the conjecture by some in the autonomous agent community that the very act of programming an agent changes how people make decisions. Our findings provide insight into the cognitive mechanisms that underlie these effects and we discuss the implication for the design of autonomous agents that represent the interests of humans.

SN Computer Science, 2020

Creating a convincing affective robot behavior is a challenging task. In this paper, we are trying to coordinate between different modalities of communication: speech, facial expressions, and gestures to make the robot interact with human users in an expressive manner. The proposed system employs videos to induce target emotions in the participants so as to start interactive discussions between each participant and the robot around the content of each video. During each experiment of interaction, the expressive ALICE robot generates an adapted multimodal behavior to the affective content of the video, and the participant evaluates its characteristics at the end of the experiment. This study discusses the multimodality of the robot behavior and its positive effect on the clarity of the emotional content of interaction. Moreover, it provides personality and gender-based evaluations of the emotional expressivity of the generated behavior so as to investigate the way it was perceived by the introverted-extroverted and male-female participants within a human-robot interaction context.

Philosophies, 2019

In this article, an enactive architecture is described that allows a humanoid robot to learn to compose simple actions into turn-taking behaviours while playing interaction games with a human partner. The robot’s action choices are reinforced by social feedback from the human in the form of visual attention and measures of behavioural synchronisation. We demonstrate that the system can acquire and switch between behaviours learned through interaction based on social feedback from the human partner. The role of reinforcement based on a short-term memory of the interaction was experimentally investigated. Results indicate that feedback based only on the immediate experience was insufficient to learn longer, more complex turn-taking behaviours. Therefore, some history of the interaction must be considered in the acquisition of turn-taking, which can be efficiently handled through the use of short-term memory.

DAT Journal

À medida que a tecnologia avança, os robôs estão cada vez mais presentes em nosso cotidiano e cultura. O campo da robótica está aberto a contribuições de vários campos, mas a definição do que é um “robô” pode ser enriquecida se analisada como um artefato de design. O objetivo desta pesquisa é promover uma definição mais amigável do design de robôs do que os pesquisadores da área de robótica querem dizer quando dizem que estão estudando ou desenvolvendo esses robôs. Foi realizada uma Revisão Sistemática da Literatura para identificar e analisar os artigos mais citados sobre o tema. Para entender a perspectiva do design, esses trabalhos foram então analisados à luz do Complexo de Funções, conforme proposto pelo Designer Victor Papanek. A revisão selecionou os 37 artigos mais citados, dentre mais de 25 mil resultados de busca em 5 portais científicos. O estudo alcançou uma visão genérica do robô à luz do Complexo de Funções.

SAGE Open, 2018

The study of social cognition involves the attribution of states of mind to humans, as well as, quite recently, to nonhuman creatures, like God. Some studies support the role of social cognition in religious beliefs, whereas others ascribe religious beliefs to an ontological knowledge bias. The present study compares these distinct approaches in 37 catholic children aged 4 to 10 years, who were administered an adapted version of the unexpected content task assessing false beliefs of different agents: a human, a dog, a robot, and God. The children were also administered an intentionality understanding task, a component of mentalization abilities, and an interview on ontological knowledge assessing emotions, intentions, imagination, and epistemic knowledge. In line with previous research, the results showed that children did not attribute false beliefs to God as they did to the human and to other nonhuman agents. Importantly, while false-belief attribution to the human was associated ...

Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is essential to evaluate and enhance indoor environmental quality (IEQ) that supports human health and productivity in building environments. Several POE methodical settings have been developed, such as interviews, paperbased questionnaires, and web-based surveys, for collecting sufficient and valid responses from occupants. However, these methods either need extensive preparation of human experts for interviews or have difficulties in engaging participants to get reliable responses and collect detailed feedback from open-ended questions. Considering the recent achievements of social robots in naturally interacting and communicating with humans by following social behaviors, this study introduced a new human-robot interaction (HRI) approach for collecting POE responses from building occupants. Two common types of human-robot interactions-verbal communication and haptic perception were developed based on the Misty Robot prototypes. The experimental results from a within-subject user study (= 18) showed that participants expressed 61% (< 0.05) more content to the descriptive open-ended questions using social robots. They also provided 87% (< 0.01) (mean word counts) more detailed IEQ-related suggestions using social robots compared to traditional web-based questionnaires. The post-study satisfaction results also indicate that almost 90% of the participants preferred HRI-based POE over web-based POE. These findings demonstrate the potential of human-robot interaction approaches for improving POE engagement and reveal the need for further systematic characterization of social robots-based POE designs and implementations. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

2018 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)

Head pose estimation is challenging in a naturalistic environment. To effectively train machine-learning algorithms, we need datasets with reliable ground truth labels from diverse environments. We present Fi-Cap, a helmet with fiducial markers designed for head pose estimation. The relative position and orientation of the tags from a reference camera can be automatically obtained from a subset of the tags. Placed at the back of the head, it provides a reference system without interfering with sensors that record frontal face. We quantify the performance of the Fi-Cap by (1) rendering the 3D model of the design, evaluating its accuracy under various rotation, image resolution and illumination conditions, and (2) comparing the predicted head pose with the location of the projected beam of a laser mounted on glasses worn by the subjects in controlled experiments conducted in our laboratory. Fi-Cap provides ideal benchmark information to evaluate automatic algorithms and alternative sensors for head pose estimation in a variety of challenging environments, including our target application for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

International Journal of Social Robotics

Rapid technological and scientific developments in the robotics field have led to the expansion of the use of service robots in domestic environments. The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to identify the factors that determine people’s psychology, attitude, and intention to use a social robotic system. A new conceptual framework is developed and empirically tested, using data from 347 people, performing Structural Equation Modeling analysis. The proposed framework incorporates various factors related to hedonic attitudes, utilitarian attitudes, normative beliefs, control beliefs, and personality traits. The results reveal predominantly the positive impact of normative beliefs and utilitarian and hedonic attitudes but, also, the negative impact of control beliefs on people’s intention to use social robot systems. Consequently, it is concluded that future clients are not only influenced by society’s general attitudes, perceptions, and prejudices towards technology but, a...

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2019

The Montréal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence states that emerging technologies ought not "encourage cruel behaviour towards robots that take on the appearance of human beings or animals and act in a similar fashion." The idea of a causal link between cruelty and kindness to artiicial and living beings, human or animal, is controversial and underexplored, despite its increasing relevance to robotics. Kate Darling recently marshalled Immanuel Kant's argument-that cruelty to animals promotes cruelty to people-to argue for an analogous link concerning social robots. Others, such as Johnson and Verdicchio, have counter-argued that animal analogies are often lawed, partly because they ignore social robots' true nature, including their lack of sentience. This, they say, weakens Darling's argument that social robots will have virtue-promoting or vice-promoting efects regarding our treatment of living beings. Certain ideas in this debate, including those of anthropomorphism, projection, animal analogies, and Kant's causal claim, require clariication and critical attention. Concentrating on robot animals, this paper examines strengths and weaknesses on both sides of this argument. It inds there is some reason for thinking that social robots may causally afect virtue, especially in terms of the moral development of children and responses to nonhuman animals. This conclusion has implications for future robot design and interaction.

Adaptive Behavior, 2016

We report on our approach towards creating socially intelligent robots, which is heavily inspired by recent experimental findings about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying action and emotion understanding in humans. Our approach uses neuro-dynamics as a theoretical language to model cognition, emotional states, decision making and action. The control architecture is formalized by a coupled system of dynamic neural fields representing a distributed network of local but connected neural populations. Different pools of neurons encode relevant information in the form of self-sustained activation patterns, which are triggered by input from connected populations and evolve continuously in time. The architecture implements a dynamic and flexible context-dependent mapping from observed hand and facial actions of the human onto adequate complementary behaviors of the robot that take into account the inferred goal and inferred emotional state of the co-actor. The dynamic control architec...

Electronic Markets

Firms use robots to deliver an ever-expanding range of services. However, as service failures are common, service recovery actions are necessary to prevent user churn. This research further suggests that firms need to know how to design service robots that avoid alienating users in case of service failures. Robust evidence across two experiments demonstrates that users attribute successful service outcomes internally, while robot-induced service failures are blamed on the firm (and not the robot), confirming the well-known self-serving bias. While this external attributional shift occurs regardless of the robot design (i.e., it is the same for warm vs. competent robots), the findings imply that service recovery minimizes the undesirable external shift and that this effect is particularly pronounced for warm robots. For practitioners, this implies prioritizing service robots with a warm design for maximizing user retention for either type of service outcome (i.e., success, failure, a...

Frontiers in Neurorobotics

IntroductionNowadays, several robots have been developed to provide not only companionship to older adults, but also to cooperate with them during health and lifestyle activities. Despite the undeniable wealth of socially assistive robots (SARs), there is an increasing need to customize the tools used for measuring their acceptance in real-life applications.MethodsWithin the Robot-Era project, a scale was developed to understand the degree of acceptance of the robotic platform. A preliminary test with 21 participants was performed to assess the statistical validity of the Robot-Era Inventory (REI) scales.ResultsBased on the criteria observed in the literature, 41 items were developed and grouped in different scales (perceived robot personality, human–robot interaction, perceived benefit, ease of use, and perceived usefulness). The reliability of the Robot-Era Inventory scale was analyzed with Cronbach&#39;s alpha, with a mean value of 0.79 (range = 0.61–0.91). Furthermore, the preli...

Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2022

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a severe psychiatric disorder with profound public health impact due to its high prevalence, chronic nature, accompanying functional impairment, and frequently occurring comorbidities. Early PTSD symptoms, often observed shortly after trauma exposure, abate with time in the majority of those who initially express them, yet leave a significant minority with chronic PTSD. While the past several decades of PTSD research have produced substantial knowledge regarding the mechanisms and consequences of this debilitating disorder, the diagnosis of and available treatments for PTSD still face significant challenges. Here, we discuss how novel therapeutic interventions involving social robots can potentially offer meaningful opportunities for overcoming some of the present challenges. As the application of social robotics-based interventions in the treatment of mental disorders is only in its infancy, it is vital that careful, well-controlled research is conducted to evaluate their efficacy, safety, and ethics. Nevertheless, we are hopeful that robotics-based solutions could advance the quality, availability, specificity and scalability of care for PTSD.

Electronics, 2021

In recent years, social robots have become part of a variety of human activities, especially in applications involving children, e.g., entertainment, education, companionship. The interest of this work lies in the interaction of social robots with children in the field of special education. This paper seeks to present a systematic review of the use of robots in special education, with the ultimate goal of highlighting the degree of integration of robots in this field worldwide. This work aims to explore the technologies of robots that are applied according to the impairment type of children. The study showed a large number of attempts to apply social robots to the special education of children with various impairments, especially in recent years, as well as a wide variety of social robots from the market involved in such activities. The main conclusion of this work is the finding that the specific field of application of social robots is at the first development step; however, it is...

Entropy

When computers started to become a dominant part of technology around the 1950s, fundamental questions about reliable designs and robustness were of great relevance. Their development gave rise to the exploration of new questions, such as what made brains reliable (since neurons can die) and how computers could get inspiration from neural systems. In parallel, the first artificial neural networks came to life. Since then, the comparative view between brains and computers has been developed in new, sometimes unexpected directions. With the rise of deep learning and the development of connectomics, an evolutionary look at how both hardware and neural complexity have evolved or designed is required. In this paper, we argue that important similarities have resulted both from convergent evolution (the inevitable outcome of architectural constraints) and inspiration of hardware and software principles guided by toy pictures of neurobiology. Moreover, dissimilarities and gaps originate fro...

Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2017

Early robotics research held that increased realism should result in increased positivity of the interactions between people and humanoid robots. However, this turned out to be true only to a certain point, and researchers now recognize that human interactions with highly realistic humanoid robots are often marked by feelings of disgust, fear, anxiety, and distrust. This phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley. In a world in which Artificial Companions are increasingly likely, and even desired, engineering humanoid robots that avoid the Uncanny Valley is of critical importance. This paper examines theories of the uncanny, and focuses on one in particular-that humans subconsciously appraise robots as potential sexual partners. Drawing from work on love, sexuality, and gender from a variety of fields, this paper speculates on possible futures in a world of intimate companionships between humans and machines.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2019

Social robots, those that exhibit personality and communicate with us using high-level dialogue and natural cues, will soon be part of our daily lives. In this paper, we gather expert opinions from different international workshops exploring ethical, legal, and social (ELS) concerns associated with social robots. In contrast to literature that looks at specific challenges, often from a certain disciplinary angle, our contribution to the literature provides an overview of the ELS discussions in a holistic fashion, shaped by active deliberation with a multitude of experts across four workshops held between 2015 and 2017 held in major international workshops (ERF, NewFriends, JSAI-isAI). It also explores pathways to address the identified challenges. Our contribution is in line with the latest European robot regulatory initiatives but covers an area of research that the latest AI and robot governance strategies have scarcely covered. Specifically, we highlight challenges to the use of ...

Springer eBooks, 2018

Humans are very good at interacting and collaborating with each other. This ability is based on mutual understanding and is supported by a continuous exchange of information mediated only in minimal part by language. The majority of messages are covertly embedded in the way the two partners move their eyes and their body. It is this silent, movement-based flow of information that enables a seamless coordination. It occurs without the two partners' awareness and the G. Sandini ( )

Human–Computer Interaction Series, 2019

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Sensors

Cyber-physical or virtual systems or devices that are capable of autonomously interacting with human or non-human agents in real environments are referred to as social robots. The primary areas of application for biomedical technology are nursing homes, hospitals, and private homes for the purpose of providing assistance to the elderly, people with disabilities, children, and medical personnel. This review examines the current state-of-the-art of social robots used in healthcare applications, with a particular emphasis on the technical characteristics and requirements of these different types of systems. Humanoids robots, companion robots, and telepresence robots are the three primary categories of devices that are identified and discussed in this article. The research looks at commercial applications, as well as scientific literature (according to the Scopus Elsevier database), patent analysis (using the Espacenet search engine), and more (searched with Google search engine). A var...