Cobot and Sobot: For a new Ontology of Collaborative and Social Robots

In the 1990’s, Robotics began to design a new robot aimed at industries (primarily automotive) that worked and interacted with humans outside the cage, thereby replacing traditional robots for some specific duties. This robot is therefore called co-bot (collaborative and robot). Also in the 1990’s, Robotics designed the social robot (for which we propose the neologism so-bot), aimed at assisting humans and keeping them company. The sociality of the sobots lies in their ability to follow the rules of human social life, make decisions independently, and respect the roles assigned to them. Scientific literature usually keeps the terms collaborative and social robot distinct as if they indicated different and separate concepts. We question this separation and affirm that to collaborate (from the Latin cum-laboro) means to interact with someone while respecting their nature. Collaboration is that particular form of sociality that relates to work activity. From this it follows that the cobot is essentially social and that cobots and sobots belong to the same category that we call co-s-bots (collaborative social robots). In other words, cobots and sobots are two types of cosbots, as the flea and the elephant are two types of animals. The difference between cobot and sobot is given by the development of AI. Both are potentially social, that is, potentially capable of interacting and making decisions independently; but while the cobot is social in potency, the sobot is social ‘in act’. With Aristotelian terminology we can therefore say that the cobot is a sobot in power, while the sobot is a cobot in act. We call this new concept ‘cobot ontology’. Such an ontology makes it possible to classify cobots according to the degree of development of AI, just as living beings are classified according to the level of intelligence developed.To teach the cosbot to interact with humans, engineers use some results of neuroscientific research such as mirror neurons and the embodied Mind. The use of these models should encourage machine self-learning. Self-learning means autonomy, and autonomy needs strong AI development. It is becoming increasingly clear that autonomy is the condition of the sociality of the sobot. The article thus concludes that the relationship between cobot and sobot is the identification of a more general robot-automaton (rabota-automatos) relationship which, in the writer’s opinion, is the essential basis and driving force behind the entire history of Robotics.