4.1. Social robots in research

While a number of social robots have been designed to serve as test beds to evaluate the technological advancements in the design of social robots, a number of robots have been used as test subjects to replace humans. Social robots present an attractive alternative to humans to serve as test subjects in a number of experimental settings especially those involving risks, privacy or ethical issues [42, 43]. Likewise, operations which are difficult or controversial to carry out on humans can be performed on social robots. Not only human biasness can be avoided but evaluations can be repeatedly performed under identical conditions. Such social robots can serve as subjects to evaluate social interactions and study their influence on cognition. Among one of the early contributions, Kismet, a robot head designed by Breazeal [44] in the late 90s for affective computing, has been employed to study caregiver behavior among infants. Likewise, infanoid is an infant-like humanoid robot that has been used to study social development in the children. Its abilities to detect humans and objects, extract emotions of the interacting partner and imitate human voice allows its usage in investigating the development of social learning skills. Similarly, Cog, a well-known humanoid robot has been employed to evaluate the behavioral and learning models. Another widely used humanoid robot test bed is iCub that articulates a 3.5 years old child and has been designed to support research in cognitive functioning and artificial intelligence.
