Abstract
The fast growth of social robotics (SR) has not been unidirectional, but rather towards a multidisciplinary scenario, creating a need for collaboration between different fields. This divergent expansion calls for a clear analysis of the field aimed at better orienting the research, thus paving the future of social robotics. This paper aims at understanding how the SR research field evolved in the last two decades by analyzing academic publications in SR and human–robot interaction using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The analysis spotted an overlap between SR and human–robot interaction research fields that have been disambiguated using a data-driven approach that leads to the identification of a new group of papers we clustered under the concept of “soft HRI.” This research topic has been analyzed by extracting trends and insights. Finally, another topic modelling step has been applied to identify seven sub-topics that have been discussed and analyzed picturing the current state of the art of SR. The paper reports a complete overview of the SR research field identifying various topics and sub-topics helping researchers in understanding the evolution of this field, thus supporting the strategic placing and evolution of their research activities.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.