Toward social robotics

This paper describes a concept of social robot systems as a self-organizing system. A distributed autonomous robot system is not autonomous as a group if the system totally depends on external intervention to maintain its fun damental functions. We discuss the meaning of autonomy for group robot syst ems and a concept of collective autonomy as a fundamental framework for des ign of the social robotic system. We first discuss the difference between c ooperative and self-organizing behavior. After a brief review of classical self-organizing system theory, we present the self-referential coupling of self-organizing systems as a design framework of the collective autonomous system. Through a primitive simulation model, we also discuss the relation between redundancy and optimality in the system structure.