Social robotics is the study and design of robots that interact with humans the way humans interact with each other: through speech, gaze, gesture, expression and shared social rules. This site maps the field, from medieval automata to conversational robots, and tracks what happens in it every day.
A short summary each day of what is happening in social robotics, with links to the original stories.
The first daily roundup is on its way.
A guide to the field, from the first ideas to the open questions researchers are still arguing about.
The definition, what makes a robot social, and why people respond to them the way they do.
Perception, conversation, faces, gaze and timing: the technology behind a robot that can hold a conversation.
Eldercare, autism therapy, education, healthcare, public spaces and the home.
Twenty robots that shaped the field, from Kismet and AIBO to Furhat, Pepper and ElliQ.
Key ideas from human-robot interaction research, and where the field publishes and meets.
Deception, attachment, privacy, children, care work and the law.
From medieval automata to large language models, era by era.
The terms you will meet in social robotics, explained plainly.
Collected automatically each morning from robotics publications and new papers on arXiv.
By the University of Glasgow Giving robot companions animal-like or anime-style faces and voices could maximise their emotional appeal to users, according to new research which could help guide the growing field of...
In shared settings, social robots may need to exchange information with an individual while limiting co-present others' access to or interpretation of that information. Publicly observable speech and gestures may not...
Social robots must coordinate speech and movement while interpreting multimodal human input. We present a multimodal framework that integrates speech, vision, and touch to generate contextually appropriate robot speech...
Deploying robots in human-shared environments requires deciding not only how to navigate, but also when dedicated social signals are worth emitting. Classic observation-based inference can be misleading in such settings:...
Understanding and modeling interactions between autonomous agents is a fundamental challenge in robotics, with broad implications for collaborative systems, social robotics, and human-robot coexistence. Although the...
Most robots are built to act on objects: welding a car body, moving a pallet, vacuuming a floor. A social robot is built to act with people. Its main job is the interaction itself: holding a conversation, teaching, keeping someone company, guiding them through a building or encouraging them through an exercise.
That makes social robotics a meeting point of engineering, computer science, psychology and design. Building the machine is only half the work. The other half is understanding how people actually respond to something that looks at them, talks back and seems to have intentions of its own. Read more.
Social Robotics
