A Social Robot for Facilitating Human Relations in Smart Environments

This paper describes how a robot may use social network analysis measures for facilitating social relations when acting as a “host” in a smart environment. The robot’s main goal consists in welcoming people, facilitating contacts and information sharing among people present in the environment. It uses knowledge on the structure of the social network for selecting the most appropriate strategy to create new relations or to spread information in the most effective way. To this aim, a multiagent system has been implemented for simulating and evaluating the functioning of the social facilitator.