Design, Development, and Applications of Service and Social Robots

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite your contributions to Electronics on the topic of service and social robots, with a special focus on the design, development, and applications.

This Special Issue aims to provide researchers and practitioners with valuable and comprehensive information on recent advances and developments in service and social robots and future research directions.

The market for service and social robots is expected to grow rapidly in the next decade. Service and social robots have many potential benefits, such as improved productivity, consistent service quality, diverse interactions with users, and reduced staffing costs. Some examples are robot wheelchairs, surveillance drones, education robots, therapy robots, entertainment robots, hospitality robots, and self-driving cars. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the deployment of robot services in the hospitality industry where people avoid face-to-face interaction. Along with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, labor shortage, and rising labor costs, the deployment of service and social robots is expected to continue in the post-pandemic era.

This Special Issue welcomes original research articles and reviews that provide new approaches and perspectives or introduce new challenges and tasks related to the design, development, and applications of service and social robots. Research areas may include (but not limited to) the following:

 RECOMMENDED TOPICS:

Topics to be discussed in this Special Issue include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Analysis and design of service and social robots;
• Design of human–robot interaction;
• Economic, social, and cultural issues of service and social robots;
• Human factors in service and social robots;
• Service and social robot evaluation techniques;
• Service and social robot applications;   
• Ethnography in service and social robots;
• Theories, models, and issues of service and social robots;
• Trust, reputation, security, and privacy issues in service and social robots development.

Prof. Dr. In Lee
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• human–robot interaction
• user behavior
• ethnography
• robots
• service robots
• social robots
• human–robot interaction
• framework
• professional robots
• domestic robots