Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Robotics can already improve working conditions in industry, the service sector, medicine, and care, increase value creation, and support people overall. Thanks to growing technical capabilities, conventional robots are becoming increasingly precise, flexible, and autonomous. Yet whenever humans and machines cooperate, social intelligence and communication and interaction adapted to the situation are essential to ensure that collaboration is both efficient and accepted. Social robotics therefore represents the next stage of evolution.
Research alliance for the next evolutionary stage of robotics
For humans and robots to work together effectively in flexible teams and real-world scenarios, robots’ socially appropriate behavior must be adapted to a wide range of complex application scenarios – which, due to the inherent complexity of social interaction and communication, is not only a technical challenge but also currently incurs high costs.
This is where the research network FORSocialRobots comes in. The collaborative project, involving scientific and industrial partners, is developing new scientific and technological foundations so that social robotics and new robot applications can be realized within a short time in six application fields relevant to society (inspection, logistics, production, service, retirement homes, and dementia centers).