This special issue aims at examining and promoting recent developments in the Assistive/Social Robotics field and future directions including the related challenges and how these can be overcome with particular focus on computational intelligence methodologies. With robots being integrated more and more in our environments and daily activities, the effectiveness of robotics applications has to rely on robots' ability to perceive, reason, and adapt on-the-fly to the users' behavior and needs. In particular, the development of personal robots, as assistive technological tools, challenges researchers to develop socially intelligent and adaptive robots that can collaborate with people in real environment. This special issue is comprised of 14 papers, fostering discussions and investigations in robot behavior adaptation and learning, in socially assistive robotics, and in developing reliable systems for natural interactions between humans and robots. Several aspects and perspectives are taken into consideration by the authors covering various topics such as adaptability during real-world human-robot interactions ; new reinforcement learning and learning by teaching techniques especially used in the context of child-robot interaction ; social robot responses, perception and adaptation by means of a semantic representation; robots acceptability and security. Furthermore, several assistive applications for the elderly, children, and people are presented. B Mariacarla Staffa