Social Robots: Boundaries, Potential, Challenges

Synchrony and reciprocity for social companion robots: benefits and challenges

Companion robots are thought to be designed for assisting humans in various domains of daily life. Domains of interest are for example teaching, household assistance and guidance but also elderly care, psychological and physical therapy and sometimes even mere social contact. The benefits for the human are clear: there is work to be done which can be taken over by a machine. The downside howeve...

Social potential fields: A distributed behavioral control for autonomous robots

Social potential fields: A distributed behavioral control for autonomous robots* John H. Reif*, Hongyan Wang I Department of Computer Science, Box 90129, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0129, USA A Very Large Scale Robotic (VLSR) system may consist of from hundreds to perhaps tens of thousands or more autonomous robots. The costs of robots are going down, and the robots are getting more compa...

Social Robots 58 . Social Robots that Interact with People

This chapter surveys some of the principal research trends in social robotics and its application to human–robot interaction (HRI). Social (or sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural, interpersonal manner – often to achieve social-emotional goals in diverse applications such as education, health, quality of life, entertainment, communication, and collaboration. The lo...

Affective social robots

For human–robot interaction to proceed in a smooth, naturalmanner, robotsmust adhere to human social norms. One such human convention is the use of expressive moods and emotions as an integral part of social interaction. Such expressions are used to conveymessages such as ‘‘I’m happy to see you’’ or ‘‘I want to be comforted,’’ and people’s long-term relationships depend heavily on shared emotio...

Social Challenges