Abstract
Verbal communication is an expanding field in robotics showing a significant increase in both the industrial and research field. The application of verbal communication in robotics aims to reach a natural human-like interaction with robots. In this study, we investigated how salient terms related to verbal communication in robotics have evolved over the years, what are the topics that recur in the related literature, and what are their trends. The study is based on a computational linguistic analysis conducted on a database of 7,435 scientific publications over the last 2 decades. This comprehensive dataset was extracted from the Scopus database using specific key-words. Our results show how relevant terms of verbal communication evolved, which are the main coherent topics and how they have changed over the years. We highlighted positive and negative trends for the most coherent topics and the distribution over the years for the most significant ones. In particular, verbal communication resulted in being highly relevant for social robotics. Potentially, achieving natural verbal communication with a robot can have a great impact on the scientific, societal, and economic role of robotics in the future.
Highlights
Robots are becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday life, entering our homes (Abdi et al, 2018; Van Patten et al, 2020), places of work (Robla-Gómez et al, 2017), hospitals (Azeta et al, 2017), and schools (Belpaeme et al, 2018)
Does the analysis provide a complete overview about the past and the present of verbal communication in robotics, but it provides an idea of what future scenarios and most promising applications might be
The presented study revealed that verbal communication is a research field that is continuously expanding in different areas of robotics
Summary
Robots are becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday life, entering our homes (Abdi et al, 2018; Van Patten et al, 2020), places of work (Robla-Gómez et al, 2017), hospitals (Azeta et al, 2017), and schools (Belpaeme et al, 2018). The need to develop a robot that can behave socially has pushed researchers to incorporate a form of communication similar to what humans use in the design, such as the non-verbal communication Spoken natural language interaction has some advantages compared to non-verbal language. It makes human-robot communication natural, accurate and efficient (Liu and Zhang, 2017) allowing for the possibility of the robot to cooperate, to be trained from non-expert humans, and to efficiently behave in a social environment (Mavridis, 2015)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
