The societal challenges arising from a diminished workforce of caregivers and nurses due to declining birth rates and increased life expectancy are significant. A potential solution lies in the automation of assistive tasks through the use of robots. However, the caregiving environment presents a particularly intricate operational setting for robots. In such contexts, tasks may involve direct interaction with individuals who are frequently frail or disabled. 

Unlike traditional manipulation scenarios where objects are assumed to be rigid, the caregiving environment introduces soft and deformable objects, including but not limited to bed sheets, clothes, and towels. Physical interaction is only half of the story, social interaction in elderly care is of equal importance. Socially assistive robotics involves designing robots that can interact with humans in a social context, understanding and responding to high-level social cues. With the emergence of LLMs and VLMs, their integration with socially assistive robots presents new challenges such as bias and fairness. We envision that a robot should have an intuitive and expressive general-purpose language/vision understanding model to assist human with daily tasks.

This workshop is taking a holistic approach to consider assistive robots that include both physical and socially assistive robots, as one may well inform the other. We aim to invite roboticists from diverse backgrounds to discuss, interact, and debate on pressing challenges of assistive robots for caregiving, to pave the way to advance the field of research.