## 3 The Importance of Facilitating Human-Robot Interaction
Therefore, the development of robots with advanced emotion recognition and HRI capabilities that can be used at school or at home is becoming essential in supporting ASD patients. Finally, several applications in the literature confirmed the importance of HRI in tourism settings. In fact, with recent technological advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, we see an increasing number of service robots entering tourism and hospitality contexts, including consumer-facing ones [47]. For instance, [PERSON] et al. developed SARA (Singapore's Automated Responsive Assistant), a robotic virtual agent, to offer information and assistance to tourists, being able to detect the user's location on a map [48]. CLARA is a virtual restaurant recommendation system and conversational agent that provides tourists with information about sightseeing, restaurants, transportation, and general information about Singapore [49]. However, the adoption of service robots inevitably changes the nature of service experience. Unlike industrial robots whose performance metrics depend entirely on efficiency, the success of service robots depends on user satisfaction and, consequently on the degree of empathy and natural interaction. [PERSON] et al. focused on consumer's evaluation of hotel service robots. In their study, they surveyed consumer response to two types of robots, NAO and Relay. The results revealed that consumer intention to accept hotel service robots is influenced by their interaction with the robot, dimensions of anthropomorphism, perceived intelligence and security [47]. The same conclusion was drawn from [PERSON] et al. in [50], where they stated that empathy from service robots has a positive and significant effect on the intention to use a robot. Empathy is meant as the robot's ability to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, i.e., the robot's ability to recognize emotion and to respond it in an appropriate way. In conclusion, beyond the requirement of well-programmed social robots, in order to cater to specific consumers or interlocutor's needs, they must incorporate a seamless integration of safe and reliable service that includes courtesy and inspires trust. With sophisticated robots or artificial agents becoming ever more ubiquitous in daily life, their appropriate use is crucial. In this section, we provided examples of their positive impact on fields such as education, healthcare, and tourism. Research on HRI requires contributions and expertise from heterogeneous disciplines, including engineering and artificial intelligence. In fact, to ensure a natural HRI, social robots need to recognize human emotions, respond adequately to them, understand and generate natural language, have reasoning skills, plan actions, and execute movements in line with what is required by the specific context or situation [51]. A good extent of the effort can be ascribed to emotion recognition, which currently requires exploring fields of facial expression analysis and speech processing, which are anything but trivial tasks. Relying on emotion recognition through non-obtrusive physiological sensing, thermal IR imaging-based affective computing can be a way to avoid some of those challenges. Although this technique is already used in the field of emotion recognition, methodological considerations are required to make it suitable for HRI applications.