A Survey of Socially Interactive Robots: Concepts, Design and Applications

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. Finally, we describe the impact of these these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An abbreviated version of this report, which does not contain the application survey, is available as [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems 42 (3-4) (2003)].