Social Robots as Cyber-Physical Actors in Entertainment and Education

For a number of years robots have been widely used in industry mainly for assembly tasks and other automated processes. Advances in robot hardware and software have significantly improved the capabilities of robots and have led researchers to investigate the potential uses of robots in other fields where more autonomy, intelligence and higher levels of interaction with humans are required. Two of these fields are education and entertainment. As robotic platforms have become more accessible and more affordable not only to researchers but also for the general public, social robots are increasingly being introduced in the classroom and the theater for educational and entertainment purposes respectively. The present paper is a short survey on the use of social robots as theatrical actors, and presents an outline of the authors' preliminary work on this field, aiming at employing this approach in special education.

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