# Embodiment in Socially Interactive Robots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.00312 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00312/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17008/) (2023)
- [Advancing Social Intelligence in AI Agents: Technical Challenges and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11023/) (2024)
- [Robots-Dont-Cry: Understanding Falsely Anthropomorphic Utterances in Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12429/) (2022)
- [Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03967/) (2024)
- [Social Neuro AI: Social Interaction as the "dark matter" of AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15459/) (2021)
- [Introducing Brain-like Concepts to Embodied Hand-crafted Dialog Management System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08996/) (2024)
- [Enactive Artificial Intelligence: Subverting Gender Norms in Robot-Human Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08741/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Design Justice Approach to Identifying Ethical Considerations in the Intersection of Large Language Models and Social Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06400/) (2024)
- [Singing the Body Electric: The Impact of Robot Embodiment on User Expectations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06977/) (2024)
- [LCMF: Lightweight Cross-Modality Mambaformer for Embodied Robotics VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18576/) (2025)
- [Responsible Personalisation: The Double-Edged Sword of Personalisation in Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06344/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Physical embodiment is a required component for robots that are structurally coupled with their real-world environments. However, most socially interactive robots do not need to physically interact with their environments in order to perform their tasks. When and why should embodied robots be used instead of simpler and cheaper virtual agents? This paper reviews the existing work that explores the role of physical embodiment in socially interactive robots. This class consists of robots that are not only capable of engaging in social interaction with humans, but are using primarily their social capabilities to perform their desired functions. Socially interactive robots provide entertainment, information, and/or assistance; this last category is typically encompassed by socially assistive robotics. In all cases, such robots can achieve their primary functions without performing functional physical work. To comprehensively evaluate the existing body of work on embodiment, we first review work from established related fields including psychology, philosophy, and sociology. We then systematically review 65 studies evaluating aspects of embodiment published from 2003 to 2017 in major peer-reviewed robotics publication venues. We examine relevant aspects of the selected studies, focusing on the embodiments compared, tasks evaluated, social roles of robots, and measurements. We introduce three taxonomies for the types of robot embodiment, robot social roles, and human-robot tasks. These taxonomies are used to deconstruct the design and interaction spaces of socially interactive robots and facilitate analysis and discussion of the reviewed studies. We use this newly-defined methodology to critically discuss existing works, revealing topics within embodiment research for social interaction, assistive robotics, and service robotics.