Social Embodiment in Autonomous Mobile Robotics

This work aims at demonstrating the inherent advantages of embracing a strong notion of social embodiment in designing a real-world robot control architecture with explicit “intelligent” social behaviour between a collective of robots. It develops the current thinking on embodiment beyond the physical by demonstrating the importance of social embodiment. A social framework develops the fundamental social attributes found when more than one robot co-inhabit a physical space. The social metaphors of identity, character, stereotypes and roles are presented and implemented within a real-world social robot paradigm in order to facilitate the realisation of explicit social goals.