A survey on the design and evolution of social robots — Past, present and future

Despite the relatively young age of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) as a field, there is a large volume of research on advances in robot hardware, software and behavior. The goal of this article is to survey trends in social robot design, to provide an evidence-based approach and guidelines that can inform future social robot development. To this end, this article systematically reviews the evolution of social robots with a focus on their applications, technical features and design. In total 9920 articles from ACM Digital Library (n=4223) and IEEE Explore (n=5697) were reviewed. In order to make this review as inclusive as possible, a broad definition of social robots was used to make decisions about inclusion/exclusion of a given social robot during the review process. As a result, a total of 344 social robots were examined in the review with features being embodiment, mobility, total number of degrees of freedom, existence of a manipulator, size, weight, shell build, applications, target user group, commercial availability, social software capabilities, sensors, interaction modalities, face, software extension capability and initial release year. This resulted in a rich dataset with detailed information about the social robots used in the HRI field. We also provide design guidelines for social robots to inform future research. Findings of this review may help both researchers & practitioners to select, and/or design, the best social robot for their particular experiment or application scenario.