A systematic survey of multiple social robots as a passive- and interactive-social medium

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic survey of the existing research in the literature on multiple social robots, which are a social medium whose behaviours are designed to interact with people in both direct and indirect ways. This medium uses multiple social robots that interact with each other. This paper explored academic databases (IEEE Xplore, ACM, PubMed, Science Direct, Springer, and Google Scholar) to locate publications from the last five years: January 2018 to June 2023. I found 59 papers on social robots with passive- and interactive-social-medium approaches and categorised and summarised them. These works discuss typical research topics and possible future avenues related to the interaction design of multiple social robots.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Passive-social medium
• interactive-social medium
• multiple social robots
• robot-robot-interaction
• systematic survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JST Moonshot R&D Grant Number JPMJMS2011.

Notes on contributors

Masahiro Shiomi

Masahiro Shiomi received M. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from Osaka University in 2004 and 2007, respectively. During that same time, he was an intern researcher at the Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories (IRC). He is currently a group leader in the Agent Interaction Design department at the Interaction Science Laboratories (ISL) and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR). His research interests include human-robot interaction, social touch, robotics for childcare, networked robots, and field trials.