A Review of Theory of Mind and Robotics: Mind Reading in Human-Robot Interaction for Proactive Social Robots.

Social robots are becoming more prevalent in our daily life and will soon become part of our society. To answer this challenge, several studies focused on how we could integrate those technologies into the current world to help humans in their daily tasks. Many areas are involved in those challenging issues, and there is a particular focus on taking inspiration from psychology studies to develop autonomous machines. One of them is interested in using Theory of Mind(ToM), a human ability that enables us to infer our own mental states and other people’s mental states. However, it is a challenging task to integrate this ability in robotics. Through an analysis of the literature, we aim to provide some examples and guidelines on applying ToM in robotics to improve their behaviours. This review gives researchers a general view of the domain and insights on how they can contribute to its development.