What Makes a Robot Social? A Review of Social Robots from Science Fiction to a Home or Hospital Near You.

Science fiction has inspired us to conceive of a future with autonomous robots helping with every aspect of our daily lives, although the robots we are familiar with through film and literature remain a vision of the distant future. While there are still miles to go before robots become a regular feature within our social spaces, rapid progress in social robotics research, aided by the social sciences, is helping to move us closer to this reality.