A social robot is an
autonomous robot that interacts and
communicates with humans or other autonomous physical
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuran ...
s by following social behaviors and rules attached to its role. Like other robots, a social
robot
A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be ...
is physically embodied (avatars or on-screen synthetic social characters are not embodied and thus distinct) Some synthetic social agents are designed with a screen to represent the head or 'face' to dynamically communicate with users. In these cases, the status as a social robot depends on the form of the 'body' of the social agent; if the body has and uses some physical motors and sensor abilities, then the system could be considered a robot.
Background
While robots have often been described as possessing social qualities (see for example the tortoises developed by
William Grey Walter in the 1950s), social robotics is a fairly recent branch of robotics. Since the early 1990s
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine
A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...
and
robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist human ...
researchers have developed robots which explicitly engage on a social level. Notable researchers include
Cynthia Breazeal, Tony Belpaeme, Aude Billard,
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Kerstin Dautenhahn (born 1964) is a German computer scientist specializing in social robotics and human–robot interaction. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she holds the Canada 150 ...
, Yiannis Demiris,
Hiroshi Ishiguro, Maja Mataric, Javier Movellan, Brian Scassellati and