Towards an Effective Design of Social Robots

In the past decade, we have witnessed an intensive progress of technology spurred on by community initiatives. The guest editors had its first meeting in 2010 to find that it was timely for the community to collectively document the recent advances in social robotics through a special issue in the International Journal of Social Robotics. This special issue presents various designs for social robots in order to make them more effective and natural for human-robot interactions. Social robots are autonomous robots that are able to interact and communicate among themselves, with humans, and with the environment and are designed to operate according to the established social and cultural norms. The main requirement for such robots is intelligence, which forms the basis of human-robot interaction. Many design requirements should be considered for social robots. Among these are the abilities to: