This collection of ten chapters written by different authors provides fairly good coverage of the field of cognitive robotics. The chapters focus on ethical, philosophical, cultural, social, psychological, human interaction, and artificial intelligence (AI) aspects of robotics, but also on chemical and physical aspects, which do not seem to have as much to do with cognitive robotics. One notable omission is a preface by the editor to put the separate contributions into perspective and to provide more information about the contributors.

The chapters included are quite different from the papers typically found in engineering robotics conferences or journals, but cognitive robotics is still in its infancy as an engineering discipline. They are also different from the papers typically published in conferences on AI, where cognitive robotics is more central, but where the focus is on computational methods to deal with planning, reasoning about sensed data and actions, learning from the environment and adapting to it, and interacting with humans.

The breadth of coverage is notable, but what I found missing from the book is coverage of cognitive architectures, which are central for cognitive robotics research. In general, limited coverage is given to the computational aspects of cognitive robotics. There is one chapter on AI aspects, but a single chapter cannot cover all the contributions made by the AI community to cognitive robotics.

The chapters are overviews and tutorial in nature, each with a good set of citations; they do not assume significant technical knowledge. This is a plus, making the book accessible to a broad audience; however, it is also a minus because the depth is necessarily limited. The book could be used as a reference book, but for that purpose it would have been better if it had included a unified list of citations. It is also a reasonably good and broad introduction to the field, which might help in bringing together different types of scientists to achieve embodied cognition.