Social Robotics

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Overview

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.

Latest papers

CardsList

80 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, down 58% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. "You've got a friend in me": Co-Designing a Peer Social Robot for Young Newcomers' Language and Cultural Learning

    Mar 19, 2026Neil Fernandes, Cheng Tang, Tehniyat Shahbaz +4Participatory DesignHuman-Robot Interaction

    University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada · United for Literacy, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  2. Faulty Coffees: Barriers to Adoption of an In-the-wild Robo-Barista

    Mar 17, 2026Bruce W. Wilson, David A. Robb, Mei Yii Lim +3Service RoboticsHuman-Robot Interaction

    Heriot-Watt University School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences Edinburgh, UK · University of Edinburgh School Informatics Edinburgh, UK · CereProc Ltd. Edinburgh, UK

  3. ELLA: Generative AI-Powered Social Robots for Early Language Development at Home

    Mar 12, 2026Victor Nikhil Antony, Shiye Cao, Shuning Wang +1Human-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    Johns Hopkins University, USA

  4. Bridging the Awareness Gap: Socially Mediated State Externalization for Transparent Distributed Home Robots

    Mar 12, 2026Wenzheng Zhao, Manideep Duggi, Fengpei YuanHuman-Robot InteractionMulti-Robot Systems

    Faculty of Robotics Engineering Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Rd, Worcester, MA, USA

  5. Beyond Theory of Mind in Robotics

    Mar 12, 2026Malte F. JungTheory of MindSocial Robotics

  6. From Pets to Robots: MojiKit as a Data-Informed Toolkit for Affective HRI Design

    Mar 12, 2026Liwen He, Pingting Chen, Ziheng Tang +4Human-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, Guangdong, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China +3

  7. Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Eye-Gaze from a Social Robot

    Mar 9, 2026Lucas Morillo-Mendez, Martien G. S. Schrooten, Oscar Martinez MozosHuman-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    Örebro University, Fakultetsgatan 1, 702 81, Örebro, Sweden

  8. POIROT: Investigating Direct Tangible vs. Digitally Mediated Interaction and Attitude Moderation in Multi-party Murder Mystery Games

    Mar 9, 2026Wen Chen, Rongxi Chen, Shankai Chen +5Human-Robot InteractionHuman-Object Interaction

    Tsinghua University Beijing, China · University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, USA · Syracuse University Syracuse, USA +2

  9. Identifying Influential Actions in Human-Robot Interactions

    Mar 9, 2026Haoyang Jiang, Chenfei Xu, Yuya Okadome +1Human-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    Guardian Robot Project, R-IH, Riken, Kyoto, Japan · Faculty of Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia · Graduate school of engineering science, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan +1

  10. Material Driven HRI Design: Aesthetics as Explainability

    Mar 6, 2026Natalie Friedman, Kevin Weatherwax, Chengchao ZhuHuman-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    BTP SAP Innovation Palo Alto, CA, USA

  11. NEFFY 2.0: A Breathing Companion Robot: User-Centered Design and Findings from a Study with Ukrainian Refugees

    Mar 5, 2026Ilona Buchem, Jessica Kazubski, Charly GoerkeHuman-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    Berlin University of Applied Sciences Berlin Germany

  12. MistyPilot: An Agentic Fast-Slow Thinking LLM Framework for Misty Social Robots

    Mar 4, 2026Xiao Wang, Lu Dong, Jingchen Sun +3Agentic AI for RoboticsLLM Agent Orchestration

    State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA

  13. Co-designing a Social Robot for Newcomer Children's Cultural and Language Learning

    Mar 2, 2026Neil Fernandes, Tehniyat Shahbaz, Emily Davies-Robinson +2Social RoboticsAssistive Robotics

    University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada · United for Literacy, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  14. Designing Robots for Families: In-Situ Prototyping for Contextual Reminders on Family Routines

    Feb 26, 2026Michael F. Xu, Enhui Zhao, Yawen Zhang +3Human-Robot InteractionRobotics

    Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison Wisconsin USA · Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago Illinois USA · Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago Illinois USA

  15. Relational Appliances: A Robot in the Refrigerator for Home-Based Health Promotion

    Feb 26, 2026Timothy Bickmore, Mehdi Arjmand, Yunus TerziogluHuman-Robot InteractionRobotics

    Northeastern University

  16. Trust in Autonomous Human--Robot Collaboration: Effects of Responsive Interaction Policies

    Feb 25, 2026Shauna Heron, Meng Cheng LauTrust in HRIHuman-Robot Interaction

    School of Social Sciences, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, P3E 2C6 · School of Engineering and Computer Science, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, P3E 2C6

  17. Botson: An Accessible and Low-Cost Platform for Social Robotics Research

    Feb 23, 2026Samuel Bellaire, Abdalmalek Abu-raddaha, Natalie Kim +3Social RoboticsHuman-Robot Interaction

    University of Michigan-Dearborn

  18. A Checklist for Deploying Robots in Public: Articulating Tacit Knowledge in the HRI Community

    Feb 22, 2026Claire Liang, Franziska Babel, Hannah Pelikan +2Human-Robot InteractionSocial Robotics

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Linköping University Linköping, Sweden · Yale University New Haven, Connecticut, USA +1

  19. Designing Social Robots with Ethical, User-Adaptive Explainability in the Era of Foundation Models

    Feb 17, 2026Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Alva Markelius, Hatice GunesExplainable Artificial IntelligenceSocial Robotics

    University of Cambridge Cambridge, United Kingdom

  20. Robot-Assisted Social Dining as a White Glove Service

    Feb 17, 2026Atharva S Kashyap, Ugne Aleksandra Morkute, Patricia Alves-OliveiraAssistive RoboticsHuman-Robot Interaction

    Robotics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA · Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands