Humanoid robots that can assist people in their daily lives at any time and communicate with them in an empathetic, humorous, and competent manner are the epitome of many visions of the future. Increased research efforts are making robots more precise, powerful, flexible, sensitive, and increasingly autonomous. Although these improved technical capabilities enable safe cooperation between humans and machines in so-called human-robot collaborations, all automated devices in the human environment still lack social skills. The logical extension of this field of research is so-called "social robotics", which is characterized by the ability of automated or, in the future, increasingly autonomous devices to communicate and interact socially with a human counterpart in a situationally appropriate manner. Since the actual use of social robots in real-life scenarios is still very limited, the goal of the joint project FORSocialRobots is to close this research gap conceptually. To this end, six socially relevant application areas - surveillance, logistics, production, service, retirement home, dementia center - provided by the participating industry partners will be analyzed in depth and the results will be critically evaluated. FORSocialRobots aims to make a significant contribution to improving the social capabilities of robots.

?