Social robots: Challenges for machine intelligence - Domain outline, main trends and issues

Usually referred as Human Friendly Robotics and Human Centered Robotics, all those application cases emphasize the crucial aspect, well captured by Social Robots, of Human-Robot interaction issues where humans are most often non-expert users and by-standers. The very nature of this interaction brings to the forefront machine-intelligence central research issues of advanced Cognitive Robotics with key themes blending a large range of topics from embodiment and appearance to open-ended learning and decisional autonomy.