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 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 persons? 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.

This broad overview for graduate students introduces multidisciplinary topics from robotics to sociology which are needed to understand the area.

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.

This volume offers eleven philosophical investigations into our future relations with social robots--robots that are specially designed to engage and connect with human beings. The contributors present cutting edge research that examines whether, and on which terms, robots can become members of human societies. Can our relations to robots be said to be "social"? Can robots enter into normative relationships with human beings? How will human social relations change when we interact with robots at work and at home? The authors of this volume explore these questions from the perspective of philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and robotics. The first three chapters offer a taxonomy for the classification of simulated social interactions, investigate whether human social interactions with robots can be genuine, and discuss the significance of social relations for the formation of human individuality. Subsequent chapters clarify whether robots could be said to actually follow social norms, whether they could live up to the social meaning of care in caregiving professions, and how we will need to program robots so that they can negotiate the conventions of human social space and collaborate with humans. Can we perform joint actions with robots, where both sides need to honour commitments, and how will such new commitments and practices change our regional cultures? The authors connect research in social robotics and empirical studies in Human-Robot Interaction to recent debates in social ontology, social cognition, as well as ethics and philosophy of technology. The book is a response to the challenge that social robotics presents for our traditional conceptions of social interaction, which presuppose such essential capacities as consciousness, intentionality, agency, and normative understanding. The authors develop insightful answers along new interdisciplinary pathways in "robophilosophy," a new research area that will help us to shape the "robot revolution," the distinctive technological change of the beginning 21st century.

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.

"Ethics and robotics are two academic disciplines, one dealing with the moral norms and values underlying implicitly or explicitly human behavior and the other aiming at the production of artificial agents, mostly as physical devices, with some degree of autonomy based on rules and programmes set up by their creators. Robotics is also one of the research fields where the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science is currently taking place with large societal and legal implications beyond traditional industrial applications. Robots are and will remain -in the foreseeable future- dependent on human ethical scrutiny as well as on the moral and legal responsibility of humans. Human-robot interaction raises serious ethical questions right now that are theoretically less ambitious, but practically more important than the possibility of the creation of moral machines that would be more than machines with an ethical code. The ethical perspective addressed in this volume is therefore the one we humans have when interacting with robots. Topics include the ethical challenges of healthcare and warfare applications of robotics, as well as fundamental questions concerning the moral dimension of human-robot-interaction including epistomological, ontological and psychoanalytic issues. It deals also with the intercultural dialogue between Western and Non-Western as well as between European and US-American ethicists."--P. [4] of cover.