Developing Socially Intelligent Robots: A Commercial Perspective, where End User Needs and Research Meets

With significant advancements in robotics, now the robots are beginning to coexist and work with us, to assist and accompany us, and to interact, play, learn and teach. Time has arrived, when social robots are getting deployed or available for practical purposes in homes, stores, and public places. E.g., Pepper robot of Aldebaran SoftBank group is planned for mass production for homes and stores in Japan, Nao robots are already being used for R&D in social interaction all across the world, and the Romeo-2 project is focusing on development and evaluation of humanoid companion robot Romeo for everyday life, etc. However diverse the application might be, the common requirement is that such robots, beyond their short term engaging effect due to novelty, should actually be able to establish long term social relations with human and with individuals, by behaving in socially expected and accepted manners. For this, the Social Intelligence, being the underlying engine for reasoning, plays crucial role. This should be further supported by the cognitive mechanism of social learning, to close the loop of social interaction and learning in long term. There are also crucial from commercial and industrial perspective of exploitation of social robots. The talk will emphasize on these aspects, highlight some of the R&D challenges and needs from industrial perspective, and point to some of the applications, targeted scenario and use cases, which need to be addressed by the community.