As robots and smart devices have become integral parts of our daily communication, especially during the pandemic, it is high time to push the envelope further and investigate how technology can be used to improve people's lives and foster healthy lifestyles. Transitioning from mere communicative functions, we slowly venture into a much more active role of robots. When leveraged with advances in AI, robotic agents can develop more advanced perception capabilities to understand human interactions and support mediation roles to support social, mental, physical and emotional aspects of human well-being. Moreover, by combining behavioral design (actuation, verbal and nonverbal modalities, etc.) with the robot's physical presence, we can transform robots into potent embodied mediators that serve the human in a trustful way and act as an effector to improving people's well-being. For example, telepresence robots can provide necessary physical support to faraway family members, or social agents can provide entertainment and diversion from anxiety. To foster bonding among individuals of different genders, cultures and age groups, the robotic agent would need to adapt to human’s mental, emotional and social needs to effectively navigate its interaction.

The workshop is planned in a highly interactive format, including open discussions among participants and invited speakers and two creative design thinking sessions. For a detailed schedule and further information, please refer to the conference web page.

List of Topics

The implementation of the envisioned embodied AI system requires a transformative perception that combines current technologies and devices with novel intervention and behavior generation strategies as well as multilevel social awareness. Therefore, we aim to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds to explore how to design, build and deploy robotic mediators to be effective across contexts and use cases. The list of possible topics includes, but is not limited to the following:

• Devices for human-robot interaction and connection
• Human perception and understanding
• Understanding of social context and group dynamics
• Interaction principles for appropriate mediation and intervention
• Design of mediated group interactions and shared activities
• Automation of robot behavior for intervention and life support
• Contextual perception and sense-making
• Robot control for physical intervention
• Human-robot collaboration
• Human expectations and trust towards machines
• Robots in education, entertainment and healthcare
• The role of art and design in human-centered robotics
• Teleoperation and telepresence robots
• Social robots and embodied agents

Submission Guidelines

All contributions must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

We welcome two kinds of submissions, a regular paper submission of 4-6 pages length describing work relevant to the workshop, and 2 page illustrations describing design concepts of potential embodiments. The first will be presented in form of short spotlight talks by the authors and posters within an interactive discussion, whereas the second will be presented in a poster format only. For demonstration, we also encourage participants to bring along their novel designs and prototypes of embodiments.

Submissions should follow the standard ICRA paper format (IEEE conference format).

Timeline

• Mar 31 2022: paper submission deadline extended: April 14 2022: paper submission deadline
• April 21 2022: notification to authors extended: April 29 202: notification to authors

Organization

• Heike Brock – Honda Research Institute Japan
• Thomas Weisswange – Honda Research Institute Europe
• Serge Thill – Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University
• Malte F. Jung – Cornell University
• Aaron J. Horowitz – Sproutel Inc.

Invited Speakers

• Randy Gomey
• Selma Sabanovic
• Angelo Cangelosi
• Susan Catherine Herring

Venue

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the IEEE ICRA 2022 Conference in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Heike Brock (heike.brock@siemens.com)