9:30 Opening remarks
9:45 Invited speaker Talk 1: Takayuki KANDA 9:55 Invited speaker Talk 2: Sarah COSENTINO 10:15 Invited speaker Talk 3: Amit Kumar PANDEY 10:35 Panel discussion with the speakers 10:55 Coffee break 11:10 Hands on (by groups) and discussions involving audience and speakers 12:30 Documentation & minutes of the workshop 12:55 Closing remarks Speakers: Takayuki KANDA (ATR, JAPAN) Title: Robovie encounters shopping-mall visitors Abstract: We have developed a human-like robot, Robovie, which to serve for various services in a shopping mall. We have studied a couple of interaction at the moment of the robot encountering people, e.g. when a robot proactively approaches a visitor, and when a robot elicits visitors to approach it. In this talk, I plan to introduce some of our relevant research works. Sarah COSENTINO (WASEDA UNIVERSITY, JAPAN) Title: Advanced human robot social interaction: goals, challenges and approaches Abstract: Human robot interaction (HRI) is not only confined to particular applications for entertainment. In fact, in any situation in which the robot works in contact with humans, interaction and mutual understanding play a crucial role. Therefore we argue that the robot must be capable of learning how to interact with humans in a natural way, to be able to understand humans’ emotional state, as well as basic non-verbal communication signals. This, for example, will allow naïve users to interact with the robot immediately, under any circumstances, without extensive training. But, especially, this will give the robot the means to calibrate its response while interacting with humans during a specific task. HRI challenges can thus be seen as a combination of active perception and dynamic cognitive processing. How can we solve the challenges that this field presents?. Amit Kumar PANDEY (SOFTBANK ROBOTICS, FRANCE) Title: Some Interaction and Social Learning Modalities for Social Robots: An industrial perspective Abstract: Never before in the history of robotics, social robots have been so close to us, in our society. We are ‘evolving’, so as our society, lifestyle and the needs. AI has been with us for decades, and now embodied in robots, penetrating more in our day-to-day life. All these are converging towards creating a smarter eco-system of living, where social robots will coexist with us in harmony, for a smarter, healthier, safer and happier life. Such consumer robots are supposed to behave in socially expected and accepted manners. This key needed technology poses the next big R&D challenge. The talk will reinforce that robots have a range of potential societal applications, and that as a robotics industry, SoftBank Robotics’ R&D and Innovation is around the centrality of wellbeing of people. The first part of the talk will illustrate some of the use cases and the market analysis. The second part will present the feedback and needs from the real users, highlighting some of the immediate R&D challenges. The talk will conclude with some open and grand challenges ahead, including social and ethical issues. Overall, the talk will reinforce the message that the aspects of natural, social and more intuitive behaviors and interfaces for a social human-robot interaction are still very interesting to explore and there is a great need of a bigger and multi-disciplinary community. |