Abstract
Objectives
The focus of robotics research is shifting from industrial robots to robots working in daily situations and one of the most important issues is to develop autonomous social robots capable to interact with and live together with humans, i.e., symbiotic robots with humans. The aim of this workshop is to introduce research activities in “Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction,” and discuss the future challenges in this research area.
One of the goals of this research is providing communication support for people, such as communication care support robot for elderly people, which is equally important as physical support in elderly care. Since human has a brain that is designed for recognizing humans, the ideal interface for humans to mediate interaction with humans and artificial systems should be at least partially humanlike. For this aim, various humanoids, including android robots, have been studied for a few decades, and full-scale social implementations are about to begin.
Not only the human-likeness, but it is also important for such a robot to possess the ability to communicate with human by spoken dialogue in the everyday life. In contrast to the text understanding or question and answer system which are commonly studied in the research field of natural language processing, dialogues in the everyday life have the different type of difficulties related to the human factor. That is, a spoken dialogue system for human friendly robots cannot be realized by only accumulating such fundamental functions and further studies are required.
Another aim is to offer a framework for understanding what human is by using robots as communication stimulus input device in the actual situations. The very humanlike robots, i.e., android robots, seem suitable for such a purpose. Thus, many studies for understanding human have been performed by cooperation of researchers from robotics and diverse research field such as cognitive science and neuro science, and it has been revealed that the response of a person faced to such a robot is more similar to the one faced to a human.
As stated above, both "development of robot" and "understanding of humans" are necessary in order to realize a society in which humans and robots coexist. In this workshop, we will introduce the research activities using communication robots, along with demonstration of an android, one of the most advancing communication robots. We will discuss the future of everyday robots, key technologies to make them able to be true companions living together with us.
Intended audience
We’d like to invite participants with diverse backgrounds since the interdisciplinary studies are crucial for this research filed. Not limited to the following list, but the intended audiences include
(1) Participants from intelligent robotics, artificial intelligence, and spoken dialogue system research fields. Since the state-of-the-art technologies in these research fields are crucial for the robots which can communicate with human in the daily environment.
(2) Researchers from diverse research fields such as neuro science, cognitive science, psychology and philosophy are also included in the intended audience. The human factor and social issues cannot be ignored and the workshop should include a discussion of the social implementation and its impact on our daily lives. Since the human understanding is also one of the important purposes, their knowledge is necessary for this workshop.
(3) Participants from industry are also welcome since the social implementation is necessary for making a step to realize the symbiotic society of human and robot and the collaboration of the academic and industry may promote the development of the symbiotic society.
(4) We also want to invite the persons new to the field. We will conduct the demonstration of an android robot and try to stimulate interest in this field.