Humanoid Robotics and Social Interaction

In the same way that there is now a PC in virtually every household and many workplace settings, it seems likely that there will be a range of robot devices assisting us at home and at work within the next 25 years. A long list of potential application areas is easy to come by (summarised here for space reasons); robots for the elderly, domestic servants, tour guides, hotel porters, ‘assistant’ robots on construction sites, a raft of military applications, leisure/gaming robots and so on. It seems very likely that robotic devices will be a pervasive element of our future society; there are many indications (e.g. [5]) that this will be a huge opportunity for life enhancement and commercial exploitation
Within this ‘service’ class of robotic devices, there is a fundamental requirement to focus on robots that interact directly with humans, i.e., where humans and robots occupy the same workspace and are not physically separated from each other in order to satisfy safety constraints. To be useful and easy to use, such robots will need varying degrees of autonomous behaviour depending on the circumstances. Although semi-autonomous robotics is not a new idea per se, real-time adaptation across the ‘autonomy-direct manipulation’ axis is novel and provides a substantial long term challenge.
BRL is now engaged in research into how humans and robots interact and exploit representations of ‘emotional’ state using visual and physical cues as well as non-verbal 

For further details of the humanoid projects click here