Liaison, safeguard, and well-being: Analyzing the role of social robots during the COVID-19 pandemic

We examine the implementation of social robots in real-world settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we analyze the areas in which social robots are being adopted, the roles and tasks being fulfilled, and the robot models being implemented. For this, we traced back and analyzed 240 deployment cases with 86 different social robots worldwide that have been adopted since the coronavirus outbreak. We found that social robot adoption during this period was strongly related to the use of this technology for crisis management. The social robots’ capacity to perform the roles of liaison to minimize direct contact among humans, safeguard to ensure contagion risk-free environments, and well-being coach to protect mental and physical health, is key to explaining adoption within this context. The results of the study offer a complete overview of social robots’ utilization in real life settings during the pandemic.