Design Space Survey on Social Robotics in the Market

ACM transactions on human-robot interaction, 2024

Socially assistive robots (SARs) are becoming more prevalent in everyday life, emphasizing the need to make them socially acceptable and aligned with users' expectations. Robots' appearance impacts users' behaviors and attitudes toward them. Therefore, product designers choose visual qualities to give the robot a character and to imply its functionality and personality. In this work, we sought to investigate the effect of cultural differences on Israeli and German designers' perceptions of SARs' roles and appearance in four different contexts: a service robot for an assisted living/retirement residence facility, a medical assistant robot for a hospital environment, a COVID-19 officer robot, and a personal assistant robot for domestic use. The key insight is that although Israeli and German designers share similar perceptions of visual qualities for most of the robotics roles, we found differences in the perception of the COVID-19 officer robot's role and, by that, its most suitable visual design. This work indicates that context and culture play a role in users' perceptions and expectations; therefore, they should be taken into account when designing new SARs for diverse contexts.

Social robots are robots interacting with humans not only in collaborative settings, but also in personal settings like domestic services and healthcare. Some social robots simulate feelings (companions) while others just help lifting (assistants). However, they often incite both fascination and fear: what abilities should social robots have and what should remain exclusive to humans? We provide a historical background on the development of robots and related machines (1), discuss examples of social robots (2) and present an expert study on their desired future abilities and applications (3) conducted within the Forum of the European Active and Assisted Living Programme (AAL). The findings indicate that most technologies required for the social robots' emotion sensing are considered ready. For care robots, the experts approve health-related tasks like drawing blood while they prefer humans to do nursing tasks like washing. On a larger societal scale, the acceptance of social robots increases highly significantly with familiarity, making health robots and even military drones more acceptable than sex robots or child companion robots for childless couples. Accordingly, the acceptance of social robots seems to decrease with the level of face-to-face emotions involved.

Current Robotics Reports, 2021

Purpose of Review: We provide an outlook on the definitions, laboratory research, and applications of social robots, with an aim to understand what makes a robot social-in the eyes of science and the general public. Recent Findings: Social robots demonstrate their potential when deployed within contexts appropriate to their form and functions. Some examples include companions for the elderly and cognitively impaired individuals, robots within educational settings, and as tools to support cognitive and behavioural change interventions. Summary: Science fiction has inspired us to conceive of a future with autonomous robots helping with every aspect of our daily lives, although the robots we are familiar with through film and literature remain a vision of the distant future. While there are still miles to go before robots become a regular feature within our social spaces, rapid progress in social robotics research, aided by the social sciences, is helping to move us closer to this reality.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2003

This paper reviews “socially interactive robots”: robots for which social human–robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of “social robots”. We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots: concepts, design and applications, Technical Report No. CMU-RI-TR-02-29, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002].

2021

KnE Social Sciences, 2020

This paper aims to show the possible and actual synergies between social robotics and sociology. The author argues that social robots are one of the best fields of inquiry to provide a bridge between the two cultures – the one represented by the social sciences and the humanities on the one hand, and the one represented by the natural sciences and engineering on the other. To achieve this result, quantitative and qualitative analyses are implemented. By using scientometric tools like Ngram Viewer, search engines such as Google Scholar, and hand calculations, the author detects the emergence of the term-and-concept ‘social robots’ in its current use, the absolute and relative frequencies of this term in the scientific literature in the period 1800-2008, the frequency distribution of publications including this term in the period 2000-2019, and the magnitude of publications in which the term ‘social robots’ is associated to the term ‘sociology’ or 'social work'. Finally, employing qualitative analysis and focusing on exemplary cases, this paper shows different ways of implementing researches that relate sociology to robotics, from a theoretical or instrumental point of view. It is argued that sociologists and engineers could work in a team to observe, analyze, and describe the interaction between humans and social robots, by using research techniques and theoretical frames provided by sociology. In turn, this knowledge can be used to build more effective and humanlike social robots.

2008

To facilitate necessary task-based interactions and to avoid annoying or upsetting people a domestic robot will have to exhibit appropriate non-verbal social behaviour. Most current robots have the ability to sense and control for the distance of people and objects in their vicinity. An understanding of human robot proxemic and associated non-verbal social behaviour is crucial for humans to accept robots as domestic or servants. Therefore, this thesis addressed the following hypothesis:

RO-MAN, 2010 IEEE, 2010

This paper introduces the industrial design of the social robot 'Flobi'. In total, three key concepts influenced the industrial design: First, the robot head of Flobi appears as a cartoon-like character and has a 'hole-free' design without any visible conjunctions. Second, Flobi has dynamic features to display not only primary emotions, but also shame, a typical secondary emotion. Third, the structural design implements exchangeable modular parts. Through modular design, the underlying hardware is quickly accessible and the visual features of the robot (e.g., hairstyle, facial features) can be altered easily. A first study demonstrated the successful implementation of Flobi's dynamic features, whereas a second study demonstrates that the exchangeable hair modules influence gender-schematic perceptions of the robot.

2013

The Social Robot: myths, reality and perspectives The engineering approach to find working solutions is a three steps process: what, why and how. Indeed, for an engineer to promote their work, he or she follows the known convincing sequence: What is the problem you want to solve, why your solution is/will be unique, and finally you show that your solution is/will work, is robust and cost-effective. For social robotics, we know why we need social robots: they could help elderly or disabled people, in terms of their social lives, etc. On the other hand, we invent some toys problem (simplified problems solved under controlled conditions) to convince others (and ourselves) that social robots can work (the HOW). Importantly only few of us can specify exactly what is a social robot. There is no absolute need to define “social robotics” and it seems that it is also not absolutely necessary to define the means to demonstrate that our research will lead to effective solutions. However, we ha...