Intelligent Social Robots for Facilitating Creative Interaction and Emotional Well-Being

Abstract

Intelligent social robots are increasingly positioned at the intersection of creative practice and emotional care. This article examines these systems as socio-technical infrastructures rather than isolated devices. The central challenge is not merely improving a single algorithm or expressive mechanism but managing structural trade-offs among autonomy, interpretability, personalization, privacy, and long-term sustainability. Drawing on human-robot interaction, affective computing, creativity research, and artificial intelligence governance, the article develops a system-level perspective on robot architectures that integrate perception, affective modeling, creative behavior generation, and therapeutic interaction. It analyzes how social robots can structure open-ended creative tasks such as storytelling, improvisation, and music making while preserving user agency and emotional safety. The discussion addresses architecture, interaction dynamics, deployment in healthcare and education, infrastructure requirements, fairness, robustness, and policy. It shows that creative interaction robots operate under deep uncertainty because emotional responses, aesthetic preferences, and social norms vary across contexts. Consequently, design must balance predictable clinical benefits with the open-ended contingencies of creative exchange. The article concludes that sustainable deployment requires governance frameworks that connect technical validation, stakeholder participation, and ongoing audit of socio-emotional outcomes. Future systems should be evaluated not only for task success but also for their capacity to support autonomy, relatedness, competence, and long-term emotional flourishing.