Contents
Vol 3, Issue 21
Editorial
- Social robotics—Trust, learning, and social interaction
Social robotics studies what it really means for humans and robots to interact and the implications of those interactions.
Focus
- Measures of incentives and confidence in using a social robot
Measures of incentives and confidence in using a social robot were stable, predictive, and sensitive to changes in robot behaviors.
- Robots for the people, by the people: Personalizing human-machine interaction
Multimodal, interactive, and multitask machine learning can personalize human-machine interaction to a broad diversity of individuals.
- Social robots in rehabilitation: A question of trust
Creating and maintaining trust in human-robot interactions should be priorities when designing social robots for rehabilitation.
- Not as bad as it seems: When the presence of a threatening humanoid robot improves human performance
“Bad” humanoid robots paying attention to human performance energized attentional control—as does human presence.
Research Articles
- Improving social skills in children with ASD using a long-term, in-home social robot
Children with ASD show improved joint attention after 1 month of in-home social skills training with an autonomous robot.
- Reading socially: Transforming the in-home reading experience with a learning-companion robot
Social robots can transform in-home reading activity into a social experience to benefit learning and interest in reading.
- Children conform, adults resist: A robot group induced peer pressure on normative social conformity
Children increasingly yielded to social pressure exerted by a group of robots; however, adults resisted being influenced by our robots.
Review
- Social robots for education: A review
A review of social robots in education discusses expected outcomes, technical challenges, and directions for future research.
About The Cover

ONLINE COVER Company's Coming. The application fields for robotics, from workplaces to family spaces, are increasing. Social robotics is a relatively new field that aims to capture the rich, dynamic nature of social interactions and environments. It cuts across many disciplines, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, psychology, medicine, social and cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and human-robot interaction. The difficulties involved are often underestimated, and our understanding of human social behavior is not as advanced as we assume. This special issue highlights some future challenges and current applications of social robotics. [CREDIT: ULZA/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM]