The term social robot or sociable robot was coined by Aude Billard and Kerstin Dautenhahn (Billard & Dautenhahn, 1997; Fong et al., 2003) and Cynthia Breazeal (2002).
The field of social robotics concentrates on the development and design of robots which interact socially with humans, but sociality between robots (e.g., in multirobot systems) is not part of the field. We can distinguish between a weak and a strong approach in social robotics. While the strong approach wants to “evolve” robots which have the capabilities to display social and emotional behavior, the weak approach investigates in the imitation of social and emotional behavior only. Social robots need to show the “human social” characteristics like the expression of emotions, the ability to conduct high-level dialogue, to learn, to develop personality, to use natural cues, and to develop socialcompetencies (Breazeal, 2002; Fong et al., 2003; Weber, 2005b). Pioneers and leading researchers in this field are Cynthia Breazeal, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Aude Billard, Frederic Kaplan, among others.
