Aim and Objectives

Robots have found their way into public spaces such as museums, airports, commercial malls, banks, company showrooms, hospitals, and retirement homes, to mention a few examples. The tasks these robots fulfil are normally either based around entertainment such as in museums and shopping malls or delivery and support roles that do not necessarily involve Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In recent years, however, there has been a push towards bringing robots into healthcare as part of patient-facing roles such as in the STRANDS and recent SPRING large-scale EU projects. This has been accentuated by the current pandemic where human-human interaction has become a thing to avoid as much as possible which has resulted in an increased interest in the use of assistive technology such as HRI in the healthcare sector. While the aim is admirable, current Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) are still facing great challenges even in normal day to day interaction. The main causes are hardware and software that have been designed to support reactive single-user interactions with the robot waiting to be instructed. This is complemented by limitations in understanding the robot’s surrounding environment including the beliefs and motivations of its interaction partners. This often leads to miscommunication which is detrimental in a domain that requires absolute trust such as in healthcare.

While decades of research in HRI have been dedicated to creating robotic systems that can interact with humans, the task of providing healthcare requires special attention due to its delicate nature and the required trust in the interaction partner. If robots are to be accepted in patient-facing roles, their behaviour has to be reliable and trustworthy as well as explainable and auditable. So while the use of robots in healthcare could have a tremendous social impact and help shape the future of care provision, there are still large hurdles to overcome.

With this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers from the fields of Human-Robot Interaction, Trust in AI, XAI, Healthcare, Ethics, Social Sciences, etc. to discuss topics related to the use of robots as care providers or support for care staff, the issues they face to gain the required trust to fulfil their role, and the societal issues surrounding this movement.

Sponsors

This workshop is sponsored by the UKRI Trust Node https://trust.tas.ac.uk