Research Trends in Social Robots for Learning

Abstract

With the growth in the number of market-available social robots, there is an increasing interest in research on the usage of social robots in education. This paper proposes a summary of trends highlighting current research directions and potential research gaps for social robots in education. We are interested in design aspects and instructional setups used to evaluate social robotics system in an educational setting. The literature demonstrates that as the field grows, setup, methodology, and demographics targeted by social robotics applications seem to settle and standardize—a tutoring Nao robot with a tablet in front of a child seems the stereotypical social educational robotics setup. An updated review on social robots in education is presented here. We propose, first, an analysis of the pioneering works in the field. Secondly, we explore the potential for education to be the ideal context to investigate central human-robot interaction research questions. A trend analysis is then proposed demonstrating the potential for educational context to nest impactful research from human-robot interaction.