Trends in Socially Assistive Robotics (TSAR):
Human-centered Approach
Workshop @ IEEE RO-MAN 2024
August 26, 2024 (half-day/morning), Room T7 and ONLINE (register here)
Hybrid Event - Pasadena, California, USA
August 26, 2024 (half-day/morning), Room T7 and ONLINE (register here)
Hybrid Event - Pasadena, California, USA
One of the growing trends in social robotics is their use as socially assistive agents, i.e. agents assisting via social interaction. Application areas of such agents include the after-care management of patients coming out of neurological disorders such as depression, facilitating therapists in psychotherapy when dealing with children with special education needs and psychopathology, the assistance to elderly navigating through loneliness, cognitive decline, or physical disability. When considering human health professionals, regardless of the assistive goal pursued, real-time awareness of the patient’s physical and psychological status seems to always play a key role in the caregiver’s decision-making process.
From a psychological perspective, this observation poses a number of questions. To what extent artificial agents should and can imitate human caregivers? Would people want a machine to know/judge their psychological status? Would they trust the machine’s judgment? Which loops of reflection and correction could be foreseen? How could professional and individual norms and values be reflected in these agents’ development? How would users, both caregivers and care recipients, envision and wish interactions with such agents to be?
From a technical perspective, this observation raises the need to (i) develop methods for the perception and modeling of relevant human behaviors/states, (ii) devise effective decision-making strategies, and (iii) design user-centered agent behaviors. A robot with such capabilities could, for example, at one moment bring a glass of water to its assisted person and at another motivate the person to go get it by themselves, on the basis of the person’s emotional, psychological and physical status. Furthermore, with the rise of transformative technology such as large language models (LLMs) and their rapid integration in the HRI community, it is inevitable to discuss the impact that they can have on the domain under discussion, particularly because a more vulnerable population is involved.
This workshop aims to bring together the two aforesaid perspectives (psychological and technical) to advance research in user-centered socially assistive agents and foster this community’s interdisciplinarity.
List of topics include but are not limited to:
Perception and modeling of human behaviors to inform interventions
Methods and strategies for adaptive decision making
User-centered robot/agent behavior design
Participatory design approaches for socially assistive agents
ELSI for socially assistive technologies
User studies with the relevant community
Please register for Workshops at RO-MAN 2024 to participate in-person.
To join online: Register here to receive your Zoom link!
Schedule is available here!
Workshop paper submission deadline: July 1st, 2024 July 15th, 2024 (Extended!)
Workshop paper acceptance notification: July 29th, 2024 August
Workshop paper camera ready (hard deadline): August 8th, 2024 August 10th, 2024
Workshop day: Morning of August 26th, 2024 (Room T7 and online)
- See the Schedule here for paper presentations -
"Social robots for child’s mental support in general healthcare settings" by Anouk Neerincx and Maartje De Graaf
"Robot Eye on Your Body Habits: Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviour Detection on Pepper" by Zachary Syvenky, Samuel Antunes Miranda, Samir Arora, Salah Eddine Chahma, Zhitian Zhang and Angelica Lim
"Studying the Performance of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems on Older Adults" by Carlos Escolano, Cristian Barrué, Jordi Picas and Guillem Alenyà
"A Preliminary Overview of the SPARCi Project" by Andreas Wildner, Elisabeth André and Jauwairia Nasir
"Analysing Large Language Models performances in benchmarks and users enjoyment for Human-Robot Interaction in Education" by Mortadha Abderrahim and Daniel Tozadore
"Dare to Care Long-Term: Social Robots in Elderly Care" by Lamia Elloumi and Somaya Ben Allouch
"Learning Human-Robot Handshaking Preferences for Quadruped Robots" by Alessandra Chappuis, Guillaume Bellegarda and Auke Ijspeert
"Modular Socially Assistive Robot for In Situ Impromptu Interactions with Older Adults" by Rhian Preston and Naomi Fitter
"Design of Communication Methods for Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit" by Ya-Chuan Hsu, Anna-Maria Velentza and Stefanos Nikolaidis
"PiRobIQ: Towards the development of a low-cost robot for improving the IQ of intellectually disabled children" by Jawaid Daudpoto
"Culturally Competent Machine Learning in Social Robotics" by Enzo Ubaldo Petrocco, Antonio Sgorbissa and Luca Oneto
(Yale University, USA)
Title of the Talk:
"The Science (and missing Science) behind Socially Assistive Robotics"
Presence: in-person
(USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USA)
Title of the Talk:
"SAR@almost25: how far we have come and what the key next steps are for SAR"
Presence: in-person
(Constructor University, Germany)
Presence: in-person
(Heriot-Watt University, UK)
Presence: online
(Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France)
Presence: in-person
(University of Augsburg, Germany)
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany)
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany)
(Swansea University (SU), UK)
(Honda Research Institute USA Inc., USA)
(University of Augsburg, Germany)