As robots integrate more into daily life, socially aware robots with specific social attributes and behaviors are necessary. This review aims to explore how social norms in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) impact robot design and human perception. We searched for relevant articles in the following databases: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Digital Library, Scopus, Springer Link, and PsycINFO. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, a final set of 69 articles were included in the review. These articles were categorized based on whether they examined norm conformity or norm violations, and were further sorted into 12 categorical norm labels to assist in analysis and comparison. By examining the existing literature, this review uncovers how social norms impact aspects of HRIs like trust, acceptance, and comfort while highlighting the importance of aligning robot design with user expectations. It reveals design challenges such as accounting for cultural variations, context-specific norms, and evolving norms over time. Addressing these challenges has the potential to improve user experiences, promote broader acceptance of robots, and foster successful integration of robots into various domains. The findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on the role of social norms in HRI, offering valuable insights and a foundation for future research.

The year 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of evoloops, an evolutionary variant of Chris Langton’s self-reproducing loops, which proved constructively that Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing organisms by variation and natural selection is possible within deterministic cellular automata. Over the last few decades, this line of Artificial Life research has since undergone several important developments. Although it experienced a relative dormancy of activity for a while, the recent rise of interest in open-ended evolution and the success of continuous cellular automata models have brought researchers’ attention back to how to make spatiotemporal patterns self-reproduce and evolve within spatially distributed computational media. This article provides a review of the relevant literature on this topic over the past 25 years and highlights the major accomplishments made so far, the challenges being faced, and promising future research directions.

To be successful, robots that can learn new tasks from humans should interact effectively with them while being trained, and humans should be able to trust the robots’ abilities after teaching. Typically, when human learners make mistakes, their teachers tolerate those errors, especially when students exhibit acceptable progress overall. But how do errors and appearance of a trainee robot affect human teachers’ trust while the robot is generally improving in performing a task? First, an online survey with 173 participants investigated perceived severity of robot errors in performing a cooking task. These findings were then used in an interactive online experiment with 138 participants, in which the participants were able to remotely teach their food preparation preferences to trainee robots with two different appearances. Compared with an untidy-looking robot, a tidy-looking robot was rated as more professional, without impacting participants’ trust. Furthermore, while larger errors at the end of iterative training had a greater impact, even a small error could significantly reduce trust in a trainee robot performing the domestic physical task of food preparation, regardless of the robot’s appearance. The present study extends human–robot interaction knowledge about teachers’ perception of trainee robots, particularly when teachers observe them accomplishing domestic physical tasks.

Continual learning (CL) has emerged as an important avenue of research in recent years, at the intersection of Machine Learning (ML) and Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), to allow robots to continually learn in their environments over long-term interactions with humans. Most research in CL, however, has been robot-centered to develop CL algorithms that can quickly learn new information on systematically collected static datasets. In this article, we take a human-centered approach to CL, to understand how humans interact with, teach, and perceive CL robots over the long term, and if there are variations in their teaching styles. We developed a socially guided CL system that integrates CL models for object recognition with a mobile manipulator robot and allows humans to directly teach and test the robot in real time over multiple sessions. We conducted an in-person study with 60 participants who interacted with the CL robot in 300 sessions with 5 sessions per participant. In this between-participant study, we used three different CL models deployed on a mobile manipulator robot. An extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected in the study shows that there is significant variation among the teaching styles of individual users indicating the need for personalized adaptation to their distinct teaching styles. Our analysis shows that the constrained experimental setups that have been widely used to test most CL models are not adequate, as real users interact with and teach CL robots in a variety of ways. Finally, our analysis shows that although users have concerns about CL robots being deployed in our daily lives, they mention that with further improvements CL robots could assist older adults and people with disabilities in their homes.