In simple words, social robots are personal companions or assistive robots that can interact with human beings using speech, vision, and gestures. These robots behave like pets that can express emotions like us and can communicate their emotions using speech or gestures.

Nowadays, most social robots have an LCD display on their heads, actuators for movement, speakers and microphone for communication, and cameras for perception.

Here are some images of popular social robots:

Figure 1: Famous social robots

Let's learn about them:

• Kismet(a): This is a social robot from MIT by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal and team, made in the 1990s. Kismet can identify people and objects and simulate different emotions. Kismet was just a research robot, not a commercial product.
• Jibo(b): Jibo was conceived by Dr. Cynthia and team in 2014. Jibo has a rotating head with a screen, and it can communicate with people using speech recognition and can recognize them using perception techniques.
• Pepper(c): Pepper is a humanoid social robot from Softbank. Unlike other social robots, this robot has two arms and a mobile base similar to a humanoid robot. Like other social robots, it can communicate with people and has tactile sensors on its body.
• Buddy(d): This robot buddy has similar characteristics to the previous robots. It has a mobile base for movement and a screen on the head to express emotions.

These may have high intelligence and social skills. But most of the robots' source code is not open source, so we can't explore much about the software platforms and algorithms they use to implement them. But in this chapter, we are going to look at some of the open source solutions to build intelligence and social skills in robots.