Project background and objectives
The PARO® robot: a colleague like any other?

In France, industrial robots, agricultural robots, telepresence robots, educational robots, military robots, logistics robots and healthcare robots are gradually entering our daily lives to assist us. Most of them are designed to perform a specific task (Oudeyer, 2014). There is also a real French strategy for the development of healthcare robotics. This includes social robots for so-called "dependent" people. A social robot or socio-bot is described as "emotional" or "affective" when it is likely to manifest certain states through its facial expressions, gestures, posture or words, as well as eliciting them in humans, and even adapting its responses and behavior to them (Baddoura, 2015). Once reactions have been identified, these social robots or socio-bots respond with adapted expressions and gestures; they maintain the illusion of understanding and being sensitive to human affective...