Social Robotics

Social robotics designs and studies robots that communicate and work with people in settings such as homes, schools, healthcare, and public spaces. Systems combine speech, gaze, gesture, emotion recognition, memory, and increasingly large language or vision-language models to support assistance, learning, companionship, and socially aware navigation. Researchers use participatory design, controlled interaction studies, real-world deployments, and benchmarks to assess outcomes such as trust, safety, acceptance, and social appropriateness. A central challenge is making robots reliable and context-sensitive across diverse people and settings while balancing personalization and proactive help with privacy, user agency, and intrusiveness.