Human–robot interaction is the study of interactions between humans and robots. It is often referred as HRI by researchers. Human–robot interaction is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural-language understanding, design, and psychology. Origins Human–robot interaction has been a topic of both science fiction and academic speculation even before any robots existed. Because much of active HRI development depends on natural-language processing, many aspects of HRI are continuations of human communications, a field of research which is much older than robotics. The origin of HRI as a discrete problem was stated by 20th-century author Isaac Asimov in 1941, in his novel I, Robot. He states the Three Laws of Robotics as: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. These three laws provide an overview of the goals engineers and researchers hold for safety in the HRI field, although the fields of robot ethics and machine ethics are more complex than these three principles. However, generally human–robot interaction prioritizes the safety of humans that interact with potentially dangerous robotics equipment. Solutions to this problem range from the philosophical approach of treating robots as ethical agents (individuals with moral agency), to the practical approach of creating safety zones. These safety zones use technologies such as lidar to detect human presence or physical barriers to protect humans by preventing any contact between machine and operator. Although initially robots in the human–robot interaction field required some human intervention to function, research has expanded this to the extent that fully autonomous systems are now far more common than in the early 2000s. Autonomous systems include from simultaneous localization and mapping systems which provide intelligent robot movement to natural-language processing and natural-language generation systems which allow for natural, human-esque interaction which meet well-defined psychological benchmarks. Anthropomorphic robots (machines which imitate human body structure) are better described by the biomimetics field, but overlap with HRI in many research applications. Examples of robots which demonstrate this trend include Willow Garage's PR2 robot, the NASA Robonaut, and Honda ASIMO. However, robots in the human–robot interaction field are not limited to human-like robots: