A Systematic Review of Ten Years of Research on Human Interaction with Social Robots

Abstract

While research and development related to robotics has been going on for decades, the past decade in particular has seen a marked increase in related efforts, in part due to technological advances, increased technological accessibility and reliability, and increased commercial availability. What have come to be known as social robots are now being used to explore novel forms of human-robot interaction, to understand social norms, and to test expectations and human responses. To capture the contributions of these research efforts, identify the current trends, and future directions, we systematically review 10 years of research in the field of social robotics between 2008 and 2018, which includes 86 publications with 70 user studies. We classify the past work based on the research topics and application areas, and provide information about the publications, their user studies, and the capabilities of the social robots utilized. We also discuss selected papers in detail and outline overall trends. Based on these findings, we identify some areas of potential future research.