Socially active humanoid robots (SAHRs) are designed to communicate and interact with humans in humancentric environment using speech, movements, gestures, or facial expressions to communicate with their users following some set of social behavior while providing their assistance. Just like humans interact in an adaptive manner with others by changing their speech, tone, and body language intuitively, such type of adaptive behavior can be developed in SAHRs to get a human-like rich interaction capabilities. Therefore, a lot of research work and studies are going on to replicate various behavioral aspects of humans into SAHRs, so that human-robot interaction can be improved further. Besides interacting with humans, humanoid robot should be able to perform the assigned tasks remotely and also in real time with better accuracy. Thus, these social robots designed can be used in a diversified field of applications like education, healthcare, entertainment, communication, constructions, medical, collaborations, hazard management systems, etc.
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The concept of autonomous devices, or automatons, has been around since ancient times, in Egypt, Greece, and China. Driven by mechanical means, using clockwork, or steam, they were capable of limited functionalities and were only capable of working for short periods. The thought of human-designed self-powered automatons capable of sentient behavior seems to have arisen in the early twentieth century. The term 'robots' itself first appeared in the year 1920, in a science fiction play, RUR (which stood for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti or Rossum's Universal Robots), written by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. In the play, the eponymous human-like machines are factory slaves, exploited by their makers to the point that they rebel against their masters, and overthrow humanity (Frumer, 2020).
In the 1940s the science-fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, began writing stories about intelligent robots with ‘positronic’ brains that could think logically and serve their human masters. Going against the then conventional plot of robots turning against their creator, Asimov's robots were governed by the Three Laws of Robotics, built into their circuitry, that ensured that robots could not harm humans, would obey them, and not allow themselves to be destroyed. Asimov himself was the first to use the term 'robotics', in the 1941 short story, Liar, to describe the field. His robot stories were a huge influence on a future generation of roboticists, who were inspired by the possibilities raised by his stories to devote their lives to the field.
With the advent of extremely miniaturized integrated circuits, by the 1960s, it became possible to create truly autonomous robots. Over the past decades, many astounding developments in the field of robotics have taken place, including robots exploring the ocean floor, robotic rovers exploring deep space, and nano-robots conducting complex surgeries. But the most science-fiction-like development in the past few years has been the introduction of collaborative robots (COBOT) that actively work beside their human makers (Matthews & Greenspan, 2020).