I believe bringing robots closer to our social sphere is vastly important for one particular reason : their acceptance. If we don't strive to make robots more than just machines then people in general will not support their development, which in turn will curtail the funding and research zeal for improving these machines.

I once saw a video by a Professor from University of Texas, Arlington. In that video her team's humanoid robot was trying to figure out the pose of the professor and her intent on picking up some objects. The goal was to show that current understanding of robot learning can make machine such as the one I described sufficiently intelligent enough to collaborate with us. But if you look closely on the robot's face, it did not show any emotion which immediately will register to you as weird or unnatural. Even the professor acknowledged this and explained why her research thrust was so in tuned in making social robots more social rather than more intelligent.

This is my two cents on this topic, hope it helped in someways.

I believe these social robots have the potentials to serve as mediators in teaching and learning acitivties based on strong NLP and CV technology!

Hi Edu, recently I'm working on designing new types of social robots for children who are struggling with social interaction, emotion regulation and recognition, lack of social motivation etc. If I should think about some future applications of social robotics I might say that robots having long-lasting interactions with humans should be one of them. To have the interaction natural, efficient, intuitive and appropriate enough, robots should have some additional features such as "understanding" the current user's personalities, emotions, intentions, needs..

Hind Z. Khaleel

I think novelty of the social robot during interaction might be an important factor in terms of advancements.

Hey,

My experience with Zora and Pepper in a rehabilitation and academic context is that they lack a lot of IA at the moment (need to much programming in advance en thus therapeutic time). Also for motoric training they are still to slow.

I am convinced though that these problems will be overcome the next five years.

I see literature about social robots in homesituations with elderly that are more promissing at the moment than the use of these devices in rehab.

Kind regards,

Lode