Assessing the Sentiment of Social Expectations of Robotic Technologies

Robotics market, both for service and industry, has been rapidly growing in the recent years and it is expected to continue in the same way. However, despite the positive forecast, some specific robotic technologies have not found a smooth path to society. In this paper, we investigate the relation between society and robotics by conducting a comprehensive analysis of papers and news articles from 1976 to 2015 with the purpose of elucidating the role of society's sentiment and attention towards robotics research and development. We could identify three peaks of inflated social attention, corresponding to industrial robots (1978-1990); and, a first (1999-2006), and second wave (2010-2015) of service robotics. Then, the sentiment analysis technique is applied on the corpus of news to discover patterns of negative or positive expectations, to finally link these expectations to specific technologies in the citation network of papers. This study points towards the development of a bibliometric indicator of social impact of technology.