The field of social robotics as means of technology selection to address country specific social issues

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to identify plausible robotic technologies to address country-specific social issues. Two stages are described. Firstly, we identify and rank country specific social issues by mining semantic relations in a newspaper database. A collection of news about Japan are analyzed through topic models and the social issues are extracted from the topics obtained. In the second stage those social issues are linked to robotic technologies by exploring the academic landscape of the social robotics, a field that has been serving to bridge the gap between robotics and society. A set of robotic technologies for the input country is shown as result. This methodology can be used by policy makers to identify technologies that best fit the necessities of a selected country.