Social Robots


Book Description

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.




Facing Social Robots


Book Description

Are there emotional reactions towards social robots? Could you love a robot? Or, put the other way round: Could you mistreat a robot, tear it apart and sell it? Media reports people honoring military robots with funerals, mourning the "death" of a robotic dog, and granting the humanoid robot Sophia citizenship. But how profound are these reactions? Three experiments take a closer look on emotional reactions towards social robots by investigating the subjective experience of people as well as the motor expressive level. Contexts of varying degrees of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) sketch a nuanced picture of emotions towards social robots that encompass conscious as well as unconscious reactions. The findings advance the understanding of affective experiences in HRI. It also turns the initial question into: Can emotional reactions towards social robots even be avoided?




The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing


Book Description

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--




Social Robots: Technological, Societal and Ethical Aspects of Human-Robot Interaction


Book Description

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


Book Description

The two-volume set LNAI 13817 and 13818 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2022, which took place in Florence, Italy, in December 2022. The 111 papers presented in the proceedings set were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. The contributions were organized in topical sections as follows: Social robot navigation and interaction capabilities (voice, tactile); Social robot perception and control capabilities; Investigating non verbal interaction with Social robots; Foster attention and engagement strategies in social robots; Special Session 1: Social Robotics Driven by Intelligent Perception and Endogenous Emotion-Motivation Core; Special Session 2: Adaptive behavioral models of robotic systems based on brain-inspired AI cognitive architectures; Advanced HRI capabilities for interacting with children; Social robots as advanced educational tool; Social robot applications in clinical and assistive scenarios; Collaborative social robots through dynamic game; Design and evaluate user’s robot perception and acceptance; Ethics, gender & trust in social robotics.




Living with Robots


Book Description

Preface to the English edition -- Introduction -- The substitute -- Animals, machines, cyborgs, and the taxi -- Mind, emotions, and artificial empathy -- The other otherwise -- From moral and lethal machines to synthetic ethics




Social Robotics


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2018, held in Qingdao, China, in November 2018.The 60 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The theme of the 2018 conference is: Social Robotics and AI. In addition to the technical sessions, ICSR 2018 included 2 workshops:Smart Sensing Systems: Towards Safe Navigation and Social Human-Robot Interaction of Service Robots.




Social Robots from a Human Perspective


Book Description

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the human dimension of social robots by discussing both transnational features and national peculiarities. Addressing several issues that explore the human side of social robots, this book investigates what a social robot is and how we might come to think about social robots in the different areas of everyday life. Organized around three sections that deal with Perceptions and Attitudes to Social Robots, Human Interaction with Social Robots, and Social Robots in Everyday Life, it explores the idea that even if the challenges of robot technologies can be overcome from a technological perspective, the question remains as to what kind of machine we want to have and use in our daily lives. Lessons learned from previous widely adopted technologies, such as smartphones, indicate that robot technologies could potentially be absorbed into the everyday lives of humans in such a way that it is the human that determines the human-machine interaction. In a similar way to how today’s information and communication technologies were initially designed for professional/industrial use, but were soon commercialized for the mass market and then personalized by humans in the course of daily practice, the use of social robots is now facing the same revolution of ‘domestication.’ In the context of this transformation, which involves the profound embedding of robots in everyday life, the ‘human’ aspect of social robots will play a major part. This book sheds new light on this highly topical issue, one of the central subjects that will be taught and studied at universities worldwide and that will be discussed widely, publicly and repeatedly in the near future.




Social Robotics


Book Description

The papers in this volume were the fruitful scientific results of the Second International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), held during November 23–24, 2010 in Singapore, which was jointly organized by the Social Robotics Laboratory (SRL), Interactive Digital Media Institute (IDMI), the National University of Singapore and 2 Human Language Technology Department, the Institute for Infocomm Research (I R), A*STAR, Singapore. These papers address a range of topics in social robotics and its applications. We received paper submissions from America, Asia, and Europe. All the papers were reviewed by at least three referees from the 32-member Program Committee who were assembled from the global community of social robotics researchers. This v- ume contains the 42 papers that were selected to report on the latest developments and studies of social robotics in the areas of human––robot interaction; affective and cognitive sciences for interactive robots; design philosophies and software archit- tures for robots; learning, adaptation and evolution of robotic intelligence; and mec- tronics and intelligent control.




Friendship, Robots, and Social Media


Book Description

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways.