Call for papers / active participation

Over the last couple of years, robots have been deployed well beyond the production line. Robots are slowly making their way into our households, and we see practical uses in e.g. search & rescue missions, and maintenance in underwater or planetary operations. An important consequence of this wider deployment is that robots are now more likely to interact with non-export users. This raises serious issues for human-robot interaction. Ultimately, the usefulness of a robot will depend on how easy it is to deal with it, to interact with it. Intuitive modes of interaction are thus likely to be a determining factor in how well robots can be integrated into our working environments and lives.

The purpose of this workshop, organized in conjunction with Robotics: Systems & Science 2006, is to discuss methodologies for establishing, developing, and evaluating mission-dependent intuitive forms of human-robot interaction.

Invited speakers for the workshop include Candy Sidner (MERL, Boston MA).

Call

The workshop is organized around a core of invited talks and panels, to ensure a broad platform for discussion. To promote active participation of the audience, we would therefore like to call for position papers and background papers on topics related to methodologies for establishing, developing, and evaluating HRI systems.

The idea behind a position paper is to state what you believe ought to be done, whereas a background paper provides a succinct statement of what you have done. The material from position papers and background papers will provide the setting for panel discussions, to be briefly presented by the panel chair, with each panel concluding a thematic block of a few presentations.

Finally, we would like to call for full papers for presentation. The idea behind a full paper is to relate what you have done to the general questions raised by the workshop: How do we establish what kind(s) of interaction would be intuitive? How do we design HRI systems that are intuitive? And how do we evaluate that they are intuitive?

For those who just want to attend the workshop without submitting a paper, please drop us a line before the submission deadline.

Submission details

The deadline for submitting papers is Monday July 3 2006. Papers should be sent by email as PDFs to gj@dfki.de, with as Subject "RSS workshop submission". Papers should be typeset following the guidelines for RSS'06 papers:

http://www.roboticsconference.org/submissions.shtml

Page limits are as follows:

• Position papers: 2 pages abstract
• Background papers: 2 pages abstract
• Full papers: 4 pages

Notifications will be sent out on July 10 2006.

Further details

Please refer to the RSS'06 website at [ http://www.roboticsconference.org ] for general information about the main conference. Please note that the deadline for early registration is July 15 2006.

For questions about the workshop, please refer to the workshop website at

http://www.dfki.de/cosy/www/events/intuitive-interaction.rss2006wsh.html