“Our mission is to look at how such a robot should be programmed to respect personal spaces of humans.”

The research also focuses on human perception of robots, including how they should look, and how a robot can learn new skills by imitating a human demonstrator.

“Without such studies, you will build robots which might not respect the fact that humans are individuals, have preferences and come from different cultural backgrounds,” Professor Dautenhahn told BBC News Online.

“And I want robots to treat humans as human beings, and not like other robots,” she added. —Robots learn ‘robotiquette’ rules (BBC)