Human Understanding of Robot Motion: The Role of Velocity and Orientation

Attribution of autonomy and its role in robotic language acquisition

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed.

Evaluation of Socially-Aware Robot Navigation

As mobile robots are increasingly introduced into our daily lives, it grows ever more imperative that these robots navigate with and among people in a safe and socially acceptable manner, particularly in shared spaces. While research on enabling socially-aware robot navigation has expanded over the years, there are no agreed-upon evaluation protocols or benchmarks to allow for the systematic development and evaluation of socially-aware navigation. As an effort to aid more productive development and progress comparisons, in this paper we review the evaluation methods, scenarios, datasets, and metrics commonly used in previous socially-aware navigation research, discuss the limitations of existing evaluation protocols, and highlight research opportunities for advancing socially-aware robot navigation.

The Social Robot in Rehabilitation and Assistance: What Is the Future?

This commentary aims to address the field of social robots both in terms of the global situation and research perspectives. It has four polarities. First, it revisits the evolutions in robotics, which, starting from collaborative robotics, has led to the diffusion of social robots. Second, it illustrates the main fields in the employment of social robots in rehabilitation and assistance in the elderly and handicapped and in further emerging sectors. Third, it takes a look at the future directions of the research development both in terms of clinical and technological aspects. Fourth, it discusses the opportunities and limits, starting from the development and clinical use of social robots during the COVID-19 pandemic to the increase of ethical discussion on their use.

A review of recent research in social robotics

Research in social robotics has a different emphasis from research in robotics for factory, military, hospital, home (vacuuming), aerial (drone), space, and undersea applications. A social robot is one whose purpose is to serve a person in a caring interaction rather than to perform a mechanical task. Both because of its newness and because of its narrower psychological rather than technological emphasis, research in social robotics tends currently to be concentrated in a single journal and single annual conference. This review categorizes such a research into three areas: (1) Affect, Personality and Adaptation; (2) Sensing and Control for Action; and (3 Assistance to the Elderly and Handicapped. Current application is primarily for children's toys and devices to comfort the elderly and handicapped, as detailed in Section 'Toys and the market for social robots in general'.