Human supervisory
control of robots in performance of routine tasks. These include handling of parts on manufacturing assembly lines and accessing and delivery of packages, components, mail, and medicines in warehouses, offices, and hospitals. Such machines can be called telerobots, capable of carrying out a limited series of actions automatically, based on a computer program, and capable of sensing its environment and its own joint positions and communicating such information back to a human operator who updates its computer instructions as required.
Automated vehicles
in which a human is a passenger, including automated highway and rail vehicles and commercial aircraft.
Multi-Modal Perception
In the HRI field, perceiving, understanding and reacting in real time to complex human activities is an important challenge, both from the point of view of the sophistication of perceptual technology (sensors, machine vision, etc.) and of the processing capacity of the collected data (e.g. distinction of linguistic and visual data, expression detection, etc.). Interesting robotic examples in this sense are Kismet (Breazeal & Scassellati, 2000) , which can detect and imitate facial expressions or ASIMO (Sakagami et al., 2002) , the humanoid that has a sophisticated system of auditory and visual perception.
Social, Service and Assistive Robotics
Service or assistance robotics concerns the application of robotics in domains such as office, rehabilitation, health care (robots that act as wheelchairs, exoskeletons, arms for rehabilitation or patient handling, for walking accompaniment, etc.) or education while social robotics focuses on man-robot social interaction modes. The definition of assistive robotics (AR) has expanded considerably in recent years, especially with the shift from exclusively physical assistance to a new type of contactless social interaction, which has defined the area of social and assistive robotics (SAR).
Human–robot social interaction
including robot devices to provide entertainment, teaching, comfort, and assistance for children and elderly, autistic, and handicapped persons.
Remote control
of space, airborne, terrestrial, and undersea vehicles for nonroutine tasks in hazardous or inaccessible environments. Such machines are called teleoperators if they perform manipulation and mobility tasks in the remote physical environment in correspondence to continuous control movements by the remote human. If a computer is intermittently reprogrammed by a human supervisor to execute pieces of the overall task, such a machine is a telerobot.
Design and Human Factors
The design of the robot is a key element for the HRI that finds its origins in the theoretical and application area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) but presents a number of differences due to the physical embodiment in the real world of the robot. The most explored areas in this field are embodiment, anthropomorphism and the simplicity or complexity of design.
Epigenetic Robotics
This area of research focuses on the development of intelligent machines with the ability to acquire skills and information independently.
Educational Robotics
Robotics is an excellent tool for learning and education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Educators use robots with both children and high school or university students also to teach the design approach and develop transversal skills such as problem solving.