Special Issue on
Expectations, Intentions,
and Actions

News

April 2012
The Special Issue has been released. We wish to thank all contributors (authors, reviewers, editors, and the Springer staff) for their efforts in making possible such a great Special Issue!

January 2012
The publication procedure is almost done. All accepted articles have been scheduled for publication in our upcoming special issue. Some of the articles are already available as 'Online First' on SpringerLink.

February 2012
Our editorial to the special issue, entitled "Expectations, Intentions, and Actions in Human-Robot Interaction" (Hanheide, Lohse, and Zender, 2012) is available as 'Online First' on SpringerLink.

Guest Editors

Marc Hanheide [Homepage]
University of Lincoln
School of Computer Science, Robotics Group
Lincoln, UK

Manja Lohse [Homepage]
Bielefeld University
Applied Computer Science, CoR-Lab
Bielefeld, Germany

Hendrik Zender [Homepage]
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH)
Language Technology Lab
Saarbrücken, Germany

Motivation

Human-robot interaction is becoming increasingly complex through the growing number of abilities, both cognitive and physical, available to today's robots. At the same time, interaction is still often difficult because the users do not understand the robots' internal states, intentions, actions, and expectations. Vice versa, robots lack understanding of the users' expectations, intentions, social signals, and actions. Different robotic systems have been built and many studies have been conducted unveiling the importance of properly designed adaptive human-robot interaction strategies in general and appropriate feedback in particular. Also a lot of progress is apparent in the different fields in robotics with regard to learning, autonomous behaviours, safe navigation, and manipulation. However, integrated approaches to

1. understanding the user and her intentions,
2. transparently communicating to the user what the robot understood or expected, and
3. designing appropriate robot behaviours based on its understanding of the world

are still in their infancy. These abilities have to be researched to facilitate more effective and efficient interaction with humans using mostly natural modalities, but also robot-specific ones, such as visualisation techniques. Robots have to be equipped with models enabling them to understand the users' state of mind based on multiple modalities to an extend necessary for successful interaction. Similarly, they have to understand and analyse their own expectations and states and make them explicit through eligible communication channels. Thus, topics to be covered range from recognition of verbal and non-verbal cues from a robot's perspective that are related to the articulation of intentions or expectations, to verbalisation and presentation techniques that make internal processing of the robot accessible to the human user(s). This proposed special issue aims to bundle recent advances, as well on the understanding as also on the communication side of the problem to mutually understand each other. It shall take a systemic point of view, emphasising the mutual influences (e.g., a robot making its expectation explicit will elicit an intention in the user) between robots and users.

List of topics

• ways of communicating the internal state, intention, and action of a robot
• ways of communicating the robot's understanding of the interaction
• recognizing the users' expectations and intentions with a robot system using different modalities or a combination of them
• ways of triggering and shaping user expectations with a robot by explicit and implicit priming
• (flexible) adaptation of robot behaviour to user expectations
• verbalisation of internal robot states and processing
• verbal and non-verbal feedback
• contingent communication and mutual influences
• human-compatible perception of the world that enables the robot to adhere to social norms
• human-compatible knowledge representations that are suitable for natural language communication

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: 15 April 2011
Abstract submission deadline: 15 April 2011 (see below!)
Extended paper submission deadline: 1 May 2011

Notification of acceptance: 1 July 2011
Submission of final papers: 1 September 2011
Final acceptance: 1 November 2011

Abstract Submission

Please send an e-mail expressing your intention to submit to the editors by April 15. This e-mail should include the title and abstract of your paper.

On-Line Submission

[ http://www.editorialmanager.com/soro/ ]

(under 'Choose Article Type', please select: "SI: Expectations, Intentions & Actions")

Further information about the journal

[ http://www.springer.com/engineering/journal/12369 ]