This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2011, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2011. The 23 revised full papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 51 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on social interaction with robots; nonverbal interaction with social robots; robots in society; social robots in education; affective interaction with social robots; robots in the home.

Socially interactive robots provide entertainment, information, and/or assistance - this last category is typically encompassed by socially assistive robotics. In all cases, such robots can achieve their primary functions without performing functional physical work. This monograph reviews the existing work that explores the role of physical embodiment in socially interactive robots. This class consists of robots that are not only capable of engaging in social interaction with humans, but are using primarily their social capabilities to perform their desired functions. It explores the embodiment hypothesis that physical embodiment has a measurable effect on performance and perception of social interactions in socially interactive robotics, and presents a thorough review of existing work and analyzes existing results and approaches to embodiment to determine the current state of the embodiment hypothesis.This is a comprehensive and in-depth overview of embodiment in socially interactive robots that is a starting point for researchers and students beginning their own research in the area.