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A Survey on Practical Applications of Small Robots as Social Robots

Conference Paper · June 2022

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Muhammad Yeza Baihaqi Sendren Sheng-Dong Xu

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 Proceedings of International Conference on System Science and Engineering 2022 (ICSSE 2022)
Electrical Engineering Building, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan, over May 26-29, 2022.

A Survey on Practical Applications of Small Robots as Social Robots

Muhammad Yeza Baihaqi1 and Sendren Sheng-Dong Xu1,2,*
1
Graduate Institute of Automation and Control, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
2
Automation & Control Center, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan

Abstract—Social robots are currently widely developed. This
paper surveys several practical applications of small robots as
social robots in various fields. This survey for the utilized robots
in some existing research includes the sensing capabilities,
communication forms, application area, and future
development.
I. INTRODUCTION
Fundamentally, social robots are the robots that have the
capabilities to interact with the human [1]. This interaction
was deeply discovered in the human-robot interaction field of
study. In general, the interaction can be divided into two types:
(i) remote interaction (human and robot are not located in the
same place) and (ii) direct interaction (human and robot are in
the same place). Also, the interaction can be done using verbal
and non-verbal communication. Currently, social robots have
been utilized in various fields to cover human tasks.
Constructing a human-sized robot perhaps will cost stacks
of money. Therefore, the purpose of this studies is to present
the various applications of small size social robots that can
cover human tasks in various fields including the sport,
campaign, psychology, and medical fields. In addition, the
small-size robots in this paper are defined as the robots with
the height lower than 100 cm or shorter than most humans.
II. METHODS AND RESULTS
A social robot has been used for campaign service by
Japanese researchers [2]. Moreover, a social robot with
speech recognition and processing capabilities has been
tested for psychological application in order to reduce
people’s anger mood [3]. Görer et al. [4] have successfully
used a robot to become an exercise coach for the elderly by
utilizing the NAO Robot and the Kinect sensor to detect
human movement. In 2021, Baihaqi et al. [5] created a
small-size robot with multiple sensing abilities such as face
detection, temperature measurement, and oxygen level
measurement to check COVID-19 symptoms in order to
prevent virus spreading from and to the security officer.
Furthermore, the research in [2]-[4] used verbal
communication; the research in [5] used gestures (non-verbal
communication). Figure 1 shows the robots that were used in
research [2]-[5].
It has been demonstrated that a small robot can perform
its work adequately despite its size. Also, to cover human
tasks, the robot does not necessarily replicate a whole body of
human. For the communication aspect, both verbal and
non-verbal are acceptable depending on the situation. For
This work is financially supported in part by the Ministry of Science and
Technology, Taiwan, under the Grant MOST 110-2221-E-011-121.
Authors are with the Graduate Institute of Automation and Control,
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan.
*Corresponding author’s e-mail: sdxu@mail.ntust.edu.tw
future development, social robotics will be in line with the
development of robot sensing and internet of things (IoT). For
example, to apply social robot as a marketing agent, the robot
should be able to communicate proactively, and send
customer data to the cloud. Next, establishing social robots
will be highly promising in resulting datasets that can be used
for deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications
that can stimulate better robot sensing. Figure 2 shows the
relationship of social robots with other fields of study.
Fig. 1. Social robots in some existing research. (a) Robot in [2]
(b) Robot in [3], [6] (c) Robot in [4], [7] (d) Robot in [5].
Fig. 2. Relationship between social robots and other study fields.
CONCLUSIONS
Based on the past research, small robots still can be utilized
as social robots for some applications. The survey shows that
the development of social robots is reliant on IoT and robot
sensing studies. In line with the advancement of these two
fields, the applications of social robot will be wider.
REFERENCES
[1] C. Breazeal and B. Scassellati, “A context-dependent attention system for
a social robot,” in Proc. International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, San Francisco, CA, USA, July 31 – Aug. 6, 1999, vol. 2, pp.
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[2] M. I. Tae, K. Ogawa, Y. Yoshikawa, and H. Ishiguro, “Using multiple
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Sciences, vol. 11, no. 13, pp. 1-15, June 2021.
[3] T. Akiyoshi, J. Nakanishi, H. Ishiguro, H. Sumioka, and M. Shiomi, “A
robot that encourages self-disclosure to reduce anger mood,” IEEE
Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 7925-7932, Oct. 2021.
[4] B. Görer, A. A. Salah, and H. L. Akin, “A robotic fitness coach for
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[5] M. Y. Baihaqi, V. Vincent, and J. W. Simatupang, “Humanoid robot
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[6] “ロボコネクト,” NTT, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://business.ntt-
east.co.jp/service/roboconnect. [Accessed:12-Feb-2022].
[7] “NAO,” SoftBank Robotics, 2018. [Online]. Available:
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