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Social robotics is the study of robots that are able to interact and communicate among themselves, with humans, and with the environment, within the social and cultural structure .

It is an interdisciplinary field that combines engineering, computing, arts, and social sciences

Social robots are autonomous robots that follow social behaviors and rules attached to their role when interacting and communicating with humans or other autonomous physical agents. They are physically embodied and can have different forms, such as human-like faces on static pedestals or furry, tail-wagging puppies.

The goal of social robotics is to develop robots that can effectively engage with humans in various settings and establish their social aspect (HRI).

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Social robot behaviors are developed to improve real-time communication and facilitate user-friendliness between Robot and Human users.
Objective is to include robots as an augmented technology to human society by demonstrating effective communication and task execution. (NLP)
It establishes human interaction with a robot using modalities like speech and vision to work along the human expectations.

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Experiments are conducted to explore Human Robot Interaction (HRI) at the Indian Institute of Science Open Day.
The set of experiments studies and analyses the effectiveness of a multifunctional desktop robot’s interaction with humans using Natural Language Processing.
The 3 DoF serial manipulator robot translates audio commands from a human user conversation to do color-based object selection, write user’s name with a greeting, entertain by producing a dance sequence for a musical track.

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Feedbacks from the human participants have been recorded for analyzing the efficacy of the HRI system.
A statistical model is developed to evaluate the performance of the robotic system during the experiments.

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Social Robotics Lab:

Towards humans understanding robots that understand humans

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Responsible and socially intelligent robots

For society and business to embrace and successfully adopt these robots, it is necessary that these robots understand the way humans communicate, read their intentions and even form social relationships.

The research of the Social Robotics Lab aims to create responsible and socially intelligent robots that can be adopted in a wide variety of human environments.

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In its most basic form an autonomous robot simply circumnavigates people with sufficient clearance. However, treating people as objects with a given size and position is not enough for successful interaction with people.
For one, a robot must respect social rules for keeping proper distance and use the proper direction of approach. What is proper is elusive, because it depends on the task of the robot, the state of the user, and environmental context.
For example, an autonomous car should stop for a pedestrian who wants to cross the street at a zebra crossing. This means that the vehicle should recognize the pedestrian’s intent to cross the street.
Similarly, a cleaning robot should be able to distinguish between people who are paying attention to it and those who do not. Thus the robot’s proper course of action depends on the intentions of people and their awareness of the situation.

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This also works the other way around. If people understand the robot’s intentions, they too can take a proper course of action.
Ideally the robot understands social conventions and incorporates them in its own behavior planning.
To this end, the robot must communicate its own intentions and recognize people’s intentions.
The question is how to do this so that people understand that the robot understands them.

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Crucial gap

A crucial gap that still needs to be bridged is that they must ultimately be accepted by humans in the human social sphere.

An essential factor playing a role in robot acceptance is the ability of robots to react appropriately to human social signals and to follow norms of human behavior. Numerous studies have investigated introducing robots to people’s daily lives, healthcare, elderly care, and education, and , robots in (special education, robots as persuaders, robots for elderly with dementia and persons with visual impairments and intellectual disabilities.

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Research results

Robots working in environments with people have to operate in in a constantly changing environment. This requires the robots to become more flexible by understanding human behavior.
Together with industrial partners we conduct research to enable robots with socially aware navigation, intention recognition and human-robot interaction. In the FAST (new Frontiers in Autonomous Systems Technology) new insights are being developed for better human-robot interaction.

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Recent examples of the Pepper robot ‘in the wild’. a The social robot was placed at the customer checkout in a German supermarket and reminded shoppers of new hygiene regulations to ensure public health in April 2020, during the global coronavirus pandemic

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