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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Front. Robot. AI

Sec. Robot Design

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1586473

This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Methods in Social Robot Behavior GenerationView all 5 articles

Autonomy in Socially Assistive Robotics: A Systematic Review

Provisionally accepted
  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Socially assistive robots (SARs) are increasingly being researched and deployed in various domains such as education, healthcare, service, and even as collaborators in a variety of other workplaces. Similarly, SARs are also expected to interact in a socially acceptable manner with a wide audience, ranging from preschool children to the elderly. This diversity of application domains and target populations raises technical and social challenges that are yet to be overcome.While earlier works relied on the Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) paradigm to give an illusion of interactivity and intelligence, a transition toward more autonomous robots can be observed. In this article, we present a systematic review, following the PRISMA method, of the last five years of SAR research, centered around SARs' level of autonomy (LoA), with a stronger focus on fully and semiautonomous robots than non-autonomous ones. Specifically, to analyse SARs' level of autonomy, the review identifies which sensing and actuation capabilities of SARs are typically automated and which ones are not, and how these capabilities are automated, with the aim of identifying potential gaps to be explored in future research. The review further explores whether SARs' level of autonomy and capabilities are transparently communicated to the diverse target audiences above described and discusses the potential benefits and drawbacks of such transparency. Finally, with the aim of providing a more holistic view of SARs' characteristics and application domains, the review also reports the embodiment and commonly envisioned role of SARs, as well as their interventions' size, length and environment.

Keywords: human-robot interaction, Socially assistive robotics, Level of autonomy, artificial intelligence, robot teleoperation, Wizard of Oz, Transparency, systematic review Frontiers

Received: 02 Mar 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Maure and Bruno. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Romain Maure, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

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