Applications and Trends in Social Robotics

Social robots are intended to coexist with humans and engage in relationships that lead them to a better quality of life [...]

Robot-Fish Interaction Helps to Trigger Social Buffering in Neon Tetras: The Potential Role of Social Robotics in Treating Anxiety

The emerging field of social robotics comprises several multidisciplinary applications. Anxiety and stress therapies can greatly benefit by socio-emotional support provided by robots, although the intervention of social robots as effective treatment needs to be fully understood. Herein, Paracheirodon innesi, a social fish species, was used to interact with a robotic fish to understand intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms causing anxiety, and how social robots can be effectively used as anxiety treatments. In the first experiment we tested the effects of a conspecific-mimicking robot on the fish tendency to swim in the bottom when transferred in a new tank. Here, P. innesi spent a significantly longer time in the upper section of the test tank when the robotic fish was present, clearly indicating a reduction of their state of anxiety due to social stimuli. The second experiment was based on a modification of the dark/light preference test, since many teleost fish are scototactic, preferring dark environments. However, when the robotic fish was placed in the white half of the test tank, P. innesi individuals swam longer in this section otherwise aversive. Social support provided by the robotic fish in both experiments produced a better recovery from anxiety due to social buffering, a phenomenon regulated by specific neural mechanisms. This study provides new insights on the evolution and mechanisms of social buffering to reduce anxiety, as well as on the use of social robots as an alternative to traditional approaches in treating anxiety symptoms.

Affective Movement in Robotic Art: Alternatives to the ‘Interiority Paradigm’ in Social Robotics

This papercritically evaluates how emotional and intentional movement is conceptualisedand deployed in social robotics and provides an alternative by analysingcontemporary robotic artworks that deal with affective human-robot interaction(HRI). Within HRI, movement as a way of communicating emotions and intent hasbecome a topic of increased interest, which has made social robotics turn totheatre and dance due to the expertise of these fields in expressive movement.This paper will argue that social robotics’ way of using performative methodswith regards to emotional movement is, nonetheless, limited and carries certainchallenges.  These challenges aregrounded on the claim that social robotics participates in what the authorcalls an ‘interiority paradigm’. That is, movement is understood to be theexpression of inner, pre-determined states. The 'interiority paradigm' poses several challenges to the development of emotional movement, with regards to unaddressed human androbotic imaginaries, an emphasis in legibility and familiarity, and arestrictive interior/exterior binary that limits the role of movement in anaffective connection. As an example of how robotscould be imagined beyond this interiority paradigm, the author proposes to turnto contemporary robotic art.Robotic art’s view on affective movement as a matter of evocationand of performative co-creation might inspire the development of robots thatmove beyond the requirement of being mere copies of a human interiority.  While the intersection between robotics andthe performing arts is a fruitful field of research, the author argues in thispaper that the way in which movement is currently being developed throughperformative methods has certain shortcomings, and that the perspective of roboticart on affective movement might open up a more interesting area of explorationfor social robotics, as well as expose those aspects of theatre and dance thathave being unaddressed in robotics. 

Speculating About Robot Moral Standing: On the Constitution of Social Robots as Objects of Governance

In recent years, the governance of robotic technologies has become an important topic in policy-making contexts. The many potential applications and roles of robots in combination with steady advances in their uptake within society are expected to cause various unprecedented issues, which in many cases will increase the demand for new policy measures. One of the major issues is the way in which societies will address potential changes in the moral and legal status of autonomous social robots. Robot standing is an important concept that aims to understand and elaborate on such changes in robots’ status. This paper explores the concept of robot standing as a useful idea that can assist in the anticipatory governance of social robots. However, at the same time, the concept necessarily involves forms of speculative thinking, as it is anticipating a future that has not yet fully arrived. This paper elaborates on how such speculative engagement with the potential of technology represents an important point of discussion in the critical study of technology more generally. The paper then situates social robotics in the context of anticipatory technology governance by emphasizing the idea that robots are currently in the process of becoming constituted as objects of governance. Subsequently, it explains how specifically a speculative concept like robot standing can be of value in this process.

Educational Requirements for Positive Social Robotics

Social robotics does not create tools but social ‘others’ that act in the physical and symbolic space of human social interactions. In order to guide the profound disruptive potential of this technology, social robotics must be repositioned—we must reconceive it as an emerging interdisciplinary area where expertise on social reality, as physical, practical, and symbolic space, is constitutively included. I present here the guiding principles for such a repositioning, “Integrative Social Robotics,” and argue that the path to culturally sustainable (value-preserving) or positive (value-enhancing) applications of social robotics goes via a redirection of the humanities and social sciences. Rather than creating new educations by disemboweling, the humanities and social sciences, students need to acquire full disciplinary competence in these disciplines, as well as the new skill to direct these qualifications toward membership in multidisciplinary developer teams.

AI Bugs and Failures: How and Why to Render AI-Algorithms More Human?

AI systems such as self-driving cars, or autonomous lethal weapons are expected to work in a framework called ‘explainable AI’, under meaningful human control, in a fail-proof way. In this chapter, the author discusses case studies where the opposite framework will prove more beneficial: i.e. in certain contexts, such as cultural and artistic production or social robotics, AI systems might be considered humanlike if they deliberately take on human traits: to bluff, to joke, to hesitate, to be whimsical, unreliable, unpredictable, and above all to be creative. In order to uncover why we need ‘humanlike’ traits -especially bugs & failures, the chapter considers representations of intelligent machines in the imagination of popular culture, and the deeply ingrained fear of the machine as the ‘other’.

Perception of the Potential for Interaction in Social Scenes

In urban environments, humans often encounter other people that may engage one in interaction. How do humans perceive such invitations to interact at a glance? We briefly presented participants with pictures of actors carrying out one of 11 behaviors (e.g., waving or looking at a phone) at four camera-actor distances. Participants were asked to describe what they might do in such a situation, how they decided, and what stood out most in the photograph. In addition, participants rated how likely they deemed interaction to take place. Participants formulated clear responses about how they might act. We show convincingly that what participants would do depended on the depicted behavior, but not the camera-actor distance. The likeliness to interact ratings depended both on the depicted behavior and the camera-actor distance. We conclude that humans perceive the “gist” of photographs and that various aspects of the actor, action, and context depicted in photographs are subjectively available at a glance. Our conclusions are discussed in the context of scene perception, social robotics, and intercultural differences.

Dynamic semantic ontology generation: a proposal for social robots

During a human-robot interaction by dialogue/voice, the robot cannot extract semantic meaning from the words used, limiting the intervention itself. Semantic knowledge could be a solution by structuring information according to its meaning and its semantic associations. Applied to social robotics, it could lead to a natural and fluid human-robot interaction. Ontologies are useful representations of semantic knowledge, as they capture the relationships between objects and entities. This paper presents new ideas for ontology generation using already generated ontologies as feedback in an iterative way to do it dynamically. This paper also collects and describes the concepts applied in the proposed methodology and discusses the challenges to be overcome.

Social Robots for Supporting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Diagnosis and Treatment

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a severe psychiatric disorder with profound public health impact due to its high prevalence, chronic nature, accompanying functional impairment, and frequently occurring comorbidities. Early PTSD symptoms, often observed shortly after trauma exposure, subside in most of individuals initially expressing them approximately one month following the trauma. While the past several decades of PTSD research have produced substantial knowledge regarding the mechanisms and consequences of this debilitating disorder, the diagnosis and available treatments for PTSD still face significant challenges in the field of mental health due to cost and availability. Here, we discuss how therapeutic inventions for PTSD involving social robots can offer meaningful opportunities for combating some of the challenges present in treating PTSD. We consider the challenges that PTSD diagnosis and treatment face, and suggest several avenues via which social robotics might offer assistance. As the application of social robotics-based interventions in the treatment of mental health conditions is only in its infancy, it is vital that careful, well-controlled research is run to evaluate their efficacy in this domain, but we are hopeful that robotics-based solutions will advance the quality, specificity and scalability of care for this debilitating disorder.