Over decades, social robotics has evolved as a concept that presently covers different areas of application, and interacts with different domains in technology, education, medicine and others. Today, it is possible to envision social robots in tasks that were not expected years ago, and that is not only due to the evolution of social robots, but also to the evolution of the vision humans have for them. This survey addresses recent advances in social robotics from different perspectives. Different contexts and areas of application of social robots are addressed, as well as modalities of interaction with humans. Different robotic platforms used in social contexts are shown and discussed. Relationships of social robotics with advances in other technological areas are surveyed, and methods and metrics used for the human evaluation of the interaction with robots are presented. The future of social robotics is also envisioned based on surveyed works and from different points of view.

Uroflowmetry (UF) is a common clinic-based non-invasive test to diagnose Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunction (LUTD). Accurate home-based uroflowmetry methods are needed to conveniently conduct repeated uroflowmetries when patients are physiologically ready to urinate. To this end, we propose and evaluate a novel mobile sonouroflowmetry (SUF) method that estimates the urinary flow rate from a sound signal recorded using a mobile phone. By linearly mapping the total sound energy to the total voided volume, the sound energy curve is transformed to a flow rate curve allowing the estimation of the flow rate over time. An evaluation using data from 44 healthy young men showed high similarity between the UF and SUF flow rates with a mixed-effects model correlation coefficient of 0.993 and a mean root mean square error of 2.37 ml/s. Maximum flow rates were estimated with an average absolute error of 2.41 ml/s. Future work on mobile uroflowmetry can use these results as an initial benchmark for flow rate estimation accuracy.

Three decades ago, telepresence was presented as an idea in the context of remote work and manipulation. Since then, it has evolved into a field combining different technologies and allowing users to have more or less realistic perceptions of immersion in remote environments. This paper reviews telepresence and its recent advances. While not covering all the work conducted in telepresence, this paper provides an array of applications for which telepresence can be envisioned, providing a clear view of the differences between components and functionalities of robotic platforms conceived for telepresence and pointing to the dependence of telepresence on several technological areas. Furthermore, challenges faced by telepresence technologies are shown, with consideration of user experiences. We consider telepresence from different perspectives, focusing on specific parts, making it possible to foresee future directions of research and applications. This review will be useful for researchers working in telepresence and related fields.

This paper presents a social robotic platform in-tended for usage as a reception agent in a university. This platform makes use of the recent advances in social robotics and conversational systems and tackles the challenge of engaging in conversations without ápriori information about the utterances it will reply to. A detailed design of an animatronics robotics head is shown. The head is actuated by mechanisms for the eyes, the jaws and the neck, to animate the platform during its interactions. The software design, architecture and framework of operation of this platform are explained.

Social robots are being conceived with different characteristics and being used in different applications. The growth of social robotics benefits from advances in fabrication, sensing, and actuation technologies, as well as signal processing and artificial intelligence. This paper presents a design and implementation of the humanoid robotic platform Adam, consisting of a motorized human-like head with precise movements of the eyes, jaw, and neck, together with capabilities of face tracking and vocal conversation using ChatGPT. Adam relies on 3D-printed parts together with a microphone, a camera, and proper servomotors, and it has high structural integrity and flexibility. Adam’s control framework consists of an adequate signal exploitation and motor command strategy that allows efficient social interactions. Adam is an innovative platform that combines manufacturability, user-friendliness, low costs, acceptability, and sustainability, offering advantages compared with other platforms. Indeed, the platform’s hardware and software components are adjustable and allow it to increase its abilities and adapt them to different applications in a variety of roles. Future work will entail the development of a body for Adam and the addition of skin-like materials to enhance its human-like appearance.

Sound source localization for machines has been studied in microphone array and binaural paradigms in most cases, while much less work has been done in the single-microphone or monaural paradigm. This paper addresses this task and presents a system designed to classify azimuths of a speech-emitting source with respect to a binaural receiver, however using only one of its ears. The system uses the spectrum second derivative calculated on short duration frames and based on a bank of gammatone filters, in conjunction with a classifier artificial neural network. It is tested to explore its abilities and the influence of different parameters on its performances. True recognition rates and confusion matrices are reported in different evaluations studying the effects of the frame duration, filterbank size, silence elimination, generalization capabilities and source movement. Reported results show an ability to classify azimuths correctly up to a certain extent depending on the parameters used, with confusions occurring mostly with neighboring azimuths. The presented system can be built upon for more efficient localization of speech sources in both azimuth and elevation components.