Making robots more intuitive to use:
Social interaction with intelligent indoor robots

Robots are moving from the factories into our homes. Today, we have the Roomba. Tomorrow, in 2010, industry aims to give us the first commercial humanoids. Bringing robots as assistants into homes, offices, and shopping malls presents serious challenges to human-robot interaction. Robots will need to assist untrained users. Robots will need to interact with people in environments that are designed for, and populated by, humans.

This workshop, organized in conjunction with ICRA 2008, focuses on how robotic systems can be designed such as to meet these challenges. Make robots adapt to the environment. Make robots socially acceptable. Make robots fit into the environment, without the environment needing to be made to fit them.
Particularly, the workshop will consider the following core questions:

• To what extent should interaction be human-like? How natural is natural supposed to be?
• What aspects are there to the social dimension of human-robot interaction? What types of intelligent capabilities does a robot need to operate in a human environment, in a socially acceptable way?
• What are principled ways to make interaction robust? And, equally important, how can we make interaction degrade gracefully? How does this relate to the previous two issues?

The format is a full-day workshop.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JANUARY 21, 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS

The workshop takes place as ICRA08 session TW-F4 on May 20, 2008, from 1000h in room 104 of the Pasadena Conference Center.

Geert-Jan M. Kruijff, Hendrik Zender, Marc Hanheide, and Britta Wrede