Learning from Social Robots

Abstract

Social robots are robots which manipulate the social world, rather than the physical world of traditional robotics. Their appearance and behaviour is designed to tap into the human desire for social interaction. Because social interaction comes naturally to all of us, there is a misconception that building artificial social interaction is easy. This talk will argue that social robotics is on the one hand one of the hardest challenges in robotics but will at same time show that relatively simple designs and behaviours can go a long way in achieving social human-robot interaction. The illustrate the power of social robots the talk will focus on how social robots can be used to support education, and in specific how social robots can support children when learning a second language.