  Emerging applications of robotics, and concerns about their impact, require
the research community to put human-centric objectives front-and-center. To
meet this challenge, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach, socially
cognizant robotics, which synthesizes technical and social science methods. We
argue that this approach follows from the need to empower stakeholder
participation (from synchronous human feedback to asynchronous societal
assessment) in shaping AI-driven robot behavior at all levels, and leads to a
range of novel research perspectives and problems both for improving robots'
interactions with individuals and impacts on society. Drawing on these
arguments, we develop best practices for socially cognizant robot design that
balance traditional technology-based metrics (e.g. efficiency, precision and
accuracy) with critically important, albeit challenging to measure, human and
society-based metrics.
