Dear Patrick Ehrenbrink ,

You say: to increase acceptance, to accomplish social tasks, and to motivate humans interactions.

I add, to help humans like social assitive robots. In this context, social robots have been generating positives effects in humans. For example, in healthcare and education contexts.

Regards.

Dear Patrick Ehrenbrink,

One of the advantages of making robots social is certainly to increase the security aspect and to ensure acceptance of the robot in its environment.

For more information I suggest you to see links and attached file on subject.

https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2016/06/social-robots.pdf.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305719516_Social_Robotics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/social-robot

https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-019-1244-6

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-019-00605-z

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/social-machines/papers/thomaz09_isrr_social.pdf

Best regards

Hi Patrick! They are really good points. I have been discussing the benefits of social interfaces in service robots for some years with colleagues and I think the main barriers are the design approaches used when the robots are conceived. Adding to your points, I think they could help to mediate Human-Human interaction in different setups. I hope this answer is useful for you.

I would like to add to this question how Social robotics compare in this terms with current technologies in order to frame in a specific way these point you describe in your question.

That's a good question

Is the question about benefits in a narrow sense of economic gain, or in the larger sense of serving human well-being? If it is meant in the latter sense, then the "non-replacement principle "of ISR (Integrative Social Robotics) can offer a heuristics to identfy beneficial applications: "social robots may only do what humans should but cannot do".