Social robots not only work with humans in collaborative workspaces – we meet them in shopping malls and even more personal settings like health and care. Does this imply they should become more human, able to interpret and adequately respond to human emotions? Do we want them to help elderly people? Do we want them to support us when we are old ourselves? Do we want them to just clean and keep things orderly – or would we accept them helping us to go to the toilet, or even feed us if we suffer from Parkinson’s disease? The answers to these questions differ from person to person. They depend on cultural background, personal experiences – but probably most of all on the robot in question. This book covers the phenomenon of social robots from the historic roots to today’s best practices and future perspectives. To achieve this, we used a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating findings from computer scientists, engineers, designers, psychologists, doctors, nurses, historians and many more. The book also covers a vast spectrum of applications, from collaborative industrial work over education to sales. Especially for developments with a high societal impact like robots in health and care settings, the authors discuss not only technology, design and usage but also ethical aspects. Thus this book creates both a compendium and a guideline, helping to navigate the design space for future developments in social robotics.

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

Social robotics drives a technological revolution of possibly unprecedented disruptive potential, both at the socio-economic and the socio-cultural level. The rapid development of the robotics market calls for a concerted effort across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines to understand the transformative potential of human-robot interaction. This effort cannot succeed without the special expertise in the study of socio-cultural interactions, norms, and values that humanities research provides. This book contains the proceedings of the conference “What Social Robots Can and Should Do,” Robophilosophy 2016 / TRANSOR 2016, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in October 2016. The conference is the second event in the biennial Robophilosophy conference series, this time combined with an event of the Research Network for Transdisciplinary Studies in Social Robotics (TRANSOR). Featuring 13 plenaries and 74 session and workshop talks, the event turned out to be the world’s largest conference in Humanities research in and on social robotics. The book is divided into 3 sections: Part I and Part III contain the abstracts of plenary lectures and contributions to 6 workshops: Artificial Empathy; Co-Designing Children Robot Interaction; Human-Robot Joint Action; Phronesis for Machine Ethics?; Robots in the Wild; and Responsible Robotics. Part II contains short papers for presentations in 7 thematically organized sessions: methodological issues; ethical tasks and implications; emotions in human robot interactions; education, art and innovation; artificial meaning and rationality; social norms and robot sociality; and perceptions of social robots. The book will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, robotics, computer science, and art. Since all contributions are prepared for an interdisciplinary readership, they are highly accessible and will be of interest to policy makers and educators who wish to gauge the challenges and potentials of putting robots in society.

This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry whose work involves advanced interaction technology and who are seeking an up-to-date overview of the key topics. It also provides supplementary educational material for courses on state-of-the-art dialogue system technologies, social robotics, and related research fields.

Human–Robot Interaction in Social Robotics explores important issues in designing a robot system that works with people in everyday environments. Edited by leading figures in the field of social robotics, it draws on contributions by researchers working on the Robovie project at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, a world leader in humanoid interactive robotics. The book brings together, in one volume, technical and empirical research that was previously scattered throughout the literature. Taking a networked robot approach, the book examines how robots work in cooperation with ubiquitous sensors and people over telecommunication networks. It considers the use of social robots in daily life, grounding the work in field studies conducted at a school, train station, shopping mall, and science museum. Critical in the development of network robots, these usability studies allow researchers to discover real issues that need to be solved and to understand what kinds of services are possible. The book tackles key areas where development is needed, namely, in sensor networks for tracking humans and robots, humanoids that can work in everyday environments, and functions for interacting with people. It introduces a sensor network developed by the authors and discusses innovations in the Robovie humanoid, including several interactive behaviors and design policies. Exploring how humans interact with robots in daily life settings, this book offers valuable insight into how robots may be used in the future. The combination of engineering, empirical, and field studies provides readers with rich information to guide in developing practical interactive robots.

Living with Robots recounts a foundational shift in robotics, from artificial intelligence to artificial empathy, and foreshadows an inflection point in human evolution. As robots engage with people in socially meaningful ways, social robotics probes the nature of the human emotions that social robots are designed to emulate.

This book explores an approach to social robotics based solely on autonomous unsupervised techniques and positions it within a structured exposition of related research in psychology, neuroscience, HRI, and data mining. The authors present an autonomous and developmental approach that allows the robot to learn interactive behavior by imitating humans using algorithms from time-series analysis and machine learning. The first part provides a comprehensive and structured introduction to time-series analysis, change point discovery, motif discovery and causality analysis focusing on possible applicability to HRI problems. Detailed explanations of all the algorithms involved are provided with open-source implementations in MATLAB enabling the reader to experiment with them. Imitation and simulation are the key technologies used to attain social behavior autonomously in the proposed approach. Part two gives the reader a wide overview of research in these areas in psychology, and ethology. Based on this background, the authors discuss approaches to endow robots with the ability to autonomously learn how to be social. Data Mining for Social Robots will be essential reading for graduate students and practitioners interested in social and developmental robotics.