A survey of socially interactive robots

Terrence Fong, Illah Nourbakhsh, Kerstin Dautenhahn
2003 Robotics and Autonomous Systems  
This report reviews "socially interactive robots": robots for which social human-robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of "social robots". We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Following this taxonomy, we survey the current state of the art, categorized by use and application area.
more » ... ly, we describe the impact of these these robots on humans and discuss open issues. (Terrence Fong), illah@ri.cmu.edu (Illah Nourbakhsh), K.Dautenhahn@herts.ac.uk (Kerstin Dautenhahn). even though there was no explicit communication or mutual recognition. As the field of artificial life emerged, researchers began applying principles such as stigmergy (indirect communication between individuals via modifications made to the shared environment) to achieve "collective" or "swarm" robot behavior. Stigmergy was first used by Grassé to explain how social insect societies can collectively produce complex behavior patterns and physical structures, even if each individual appears to work alone [19] . Deneubourg and his collaborators pioneered the first experiments on stigmergy in simulated and physical "ant-like robots" [75, 13] in the early 1990's. Since then, numerous researchers have developed
doi:10.1016/s0921-8890(02)00372-x fatcat:iwjtltmh65cb3icwsy2svbls54