Robot communication: It's more than just talk

August 2, 2017 --C-3PO's fluency in more than 6 million forms of communication in "Star Wars" set a high bar for human-robot interaction, and the field has been struggling to catch up ever since. They started in the factories, taking over physically demanding and repetitive tasks. Now robots are moving into hospitals, shopping malls, even the International Space Station, and experts don't expect their expansion into human spaces to slow down anytime soon. "Even 10 years ago, the primary use of the robots was in the dangerous, dirty, and dull work," says Julie Shah, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "You'd deploy them to operate remotely from people, but [now] robots are integrating into all aspects of our lives relatively quickly."