United States

Social robots are rarely confined to a task-specific or problem-specific work envelope. For instance, an assistive robot working in a senior center can incidentally become a companion or even a trusted confidante. Increasingly operating in public spaces, social robots can be easily caught in mundane yet morally ambivalent urban situations that are often dynamic, complex, and unpredictable, presenting novel factors and agencies that can quickly exceed the scope of any projected human-robot interaction. Anticipating how a robot should respond in these situations may mitigate interaction failures. To improve foresight in these situations, we propose the frame of Situated Ethics for Urban Encounters (SEUE) and probe this frame through 18 mundane yet morally ambivalent scenarios of human-robot interaction in a public library using the speed-dating research method with storyboards. Our findings suggest: (i) There are ambiguous but morally important interactions even in a public library; (ii) Unlike humans, robots are expected to do many things at once and some actions may risk deception; (iii) The importance of childrens rights in these situations; (iv) A need for creatively opportunistic interaction when responding to the ethical challenges of the situation; and (v) Residual risks exist even in a perceived ethical response on the part of the robot. We contribute to empirical HRI ethics by demonstrating how the speed-dating technique in a participatory design setting could be used to unpack, interpret, discuss, and elicit possible HRI responses in urban situations, which are expected to only become more important as robots show up in cities.

IEEE RO-MAN 2024

Robots among Us: An Exploratory Study on the Situated Ethics of Human-Robot Interactions in a Public Library

hri ethics

speed-dating technique

situated ethics for urban encounters

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

technical paper

[![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/f25361a85b7c83a7476c0b3c1c0bb1b2.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18jcAcciCBQHj6R07Dbpm2HCOBEIwAOCU/view?usp=sharing)


Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, IEEE RO-MAN 2024, was held at Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, USA.

The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was **“Embracing Human-Centered HRI”**.

With the continuous technological effort of understanding human needs, creating human-desired robotic systems, and developing real human user experiences, we are marching together towards building a promising and excellent human quality of life, all for our wellness and our next generation.

The conference provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss a variety of topics related to the broad theme of Robot and Human Interactive Communication involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies, and generated more insights for the future of Robot and Human Interactive Communication!

We hope you continue to enjoy the post-conference content on Underline!
<br><br>

You need to log in with the email address you registered with. Access credentials have been sent to your email. 

Please be sure to check your spam and other email folders if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in to explore this event.

It looks like you are not registered for this event. 

A registration is required to access this event page. 



Registration Is Required

The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication was held in Pasadena, California, USA. The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was “Embracing Human-Centered HRI”.

In recent years, the awareness of the academy around responsible research has notably increased. For instance, with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, recent efforts have been made to promote ethical, fair, and inclusive AI and robotics. However, the field of human-robot-interaction (HRI) is seemingly lagging behind these practices. To better understand if and to what extent HRI is incentivizing researchers to engage in responsible research, we conducted an exploratory review of the publishing guidelines for the most popular HRI conference venues. We identified 18 conferences which published at least 7 HRI papers in 2022. From these, we discuss four themes relevant to conducting responsible HRI research in line with the Responsible Research and Innovation framework: ethical and human participant considerations, transparency and reproducibility, accessibility and inclusion, and plagiarism and LLM use. We identify several gaps and room for improvement within HRI regarding responsible research. Finally, we establish a call to action to provoke novel conversations among HRI researchers about the importance of conducting responsible research within emerging fields like HRI.

HRI Wasn't Built in a Day: A Call to Action for Responsible HRI Research

Industrial robot programming necessitates specialized expertise and significant time commitment, particularly for small-batch productions. In response to the escalating demand for production agility, novel approaches have emerged in intuitive robot programming. These inventive systems, rooted in diverse conceptual frameworks, are designed to expedite the deployment of robot systems. A prominent innovation in this domain is adopting no-code robot programming through finger-based gestures. A robot program can be generated by capturing and tracking non-expert users' finger movements and gestures, converting 3D coordinates into an executable robot programming language. However, accurately determining finger positions for 3D coordinates and precise geometrical features presents an ongoing challenge. In pursuit of heightened trajectory precision and reducing more significant effort for the users, we propose a hybrid methodology that amalgamates finger-gesture programming with point cloud data. This synergistic integration demonstrates promising outcomes, substantiating its potential to facilitate the precise and adaptive generation of robot paths within real industrial scenarios.

A Hybrid Approach of No-Code Robot Programming for Agile Production: Integrating Finger-Gesture and Point Cloud

This paper presents a novel approach to multi-task visual-guided imitation learning. Upon evaluating the current state-of-the-art method, we observed its capability to replicate the intent of the demonstrator, but with the flaw of manipulating incorrect objects. To address this issue, our study introduces a new approach based on the assumption that explicitly addressing task-relevant problems, such as target object localization, can enhance system performance. Our validation shows that the proposal overtakes the leading method thanks to its ability to drive the robot motion towards the target object.

Improving Learning from Visual Demonstration Methods by Target Localization

In this paper, we build upon two major recent developments in the field, Diffusion Policies for visuomotor manipulation and large pre-trained multimodal foundational models to obtain a robotic skill learning system. The system can obtain new skills via the behavioral cloning approach of visuomotor diffusion policies given teleoperated demonstrations. Foundational models are being used to perform skill selection given the user's prompt in natural language. Before executing a skill the foundational model performs a precondition check given an observation of the workspace. We compare the performance of different foundational models to this end and give a detailed experimental evaluation of the skills taught by the user in simulation and the real world. Finally, we showcase the combined system on a challenging food serving scenario in the real world. Videos of all experimental executions, as well as the process of teaching new skills in simulation and the real world, are available on the project's website.

A Robotic Skill Learning System Built Upon Diffusion Policies and Foundation Models

For social robots to succeed in places such as homes, they must learn new skills from various people and act in a manner desirable to different users. We introduce a novel biologically inspired approach for robot learning through program-level imitation, inspired by the way primates, including humans, understand and perform complex actions. Our approach enables robots to discover the hierarchical structure of tasks by identifying sequential regularities and sub-goals from diverse human demonstrations. To do so, human-provided demonstrations, which can be obtained by a robot through different modalities (such as kinesthetic teaching, behavioural observation, and verbal instruction), are processed by an algorithm that discovers multiple possibilities for arranging observed sub-goals to achieve a final goal. Prior to acting, the available sequences are evaluated based on user-defined criteria, through mental simulation of the task by the robot, to find the optimal sequence of actions. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented our system on an iCub humanoid robot and present here how our method allowed the robot to adapt its action sequences for task execution when starting the task from different states, incorporating user preference for finishing the task as fast as possible. Our envisaged system is meant to accommodate variations in human teaching styles and is expected to help a robot perform tasks with greater flexibility and efficiency. This work contributes by proposing a framework for robots to learn from humans at an abstract level, opening the way to more adaptable and intelligent robotic assistants in everyday tasks.

A Biologically Inspired Program-Level Imitation Approach for Robots: Proof-Of-Concept

Dialogs between humans and social robots are often fact-oriented and not very mood-dependent, at least on the part of the robot. This raises the question of what influence the tonality of the utterances has on the perceived personality of the robot and how this influences the user's further expectations. One element that is not necessarily expected from robots in conversation is humor, especially the use of irony and sarcasm. We examined the effect of a conversation with cheerfully ironic or sullenly sarcastic remarks by the robot in contrast to utterances in a more seriously neutral tone. To measure these effects in terms of perceived warmth, competence and possible discomfort in conversation we used the Robotic Social Attributes Scale (RoSAS) on 20 participants with an age ranging from 26 to 58. In addition, we asked the participants for their assessment of the suitability of the robot's dialog style for different areas of application and which dialog style they personally liked best. The dialog parts of the robot were generated with ChatGPT using suitable prompts. Our results showed that the perceived warmth gained highest rates when when the robot hat a cheerfully ironic tone. Discomfort was rated significantly higher when a sullenly sarcastic tone was used by the robot. Perceived competence seemed to be slightly negatively influenced in the sarcastic condition. The results proved that tonality appears to be a very relevant design element for a successful interaction between humans and robots, but must be used carefully to achieve the desired goal.

Introducing a Note of Levity to Human-Robot Interaction with Dialogs Containing Irony, Sarcasm and Jocularity

The goal-directed behavior observed in humans arises from the intricate interplay of various processes, including personality dynamics, emotional responses to others, memory encoding, the anticipation of future actions, and associated hedonic experiences. Integrating these multiple processes characteristic of human intelligence into a robotic framework aims to enhance the human-likeness of artificial agents and facilitate more natural and intuitive interactions with humans.   For this purpose, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive psychological and cognitive architecture where, personality, as it happens for humans, not only influences the execution of actions but also shapes internal reactions to human emotions and guides anticipatory decision-making processes tailored to the agent's traits. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in generating perceivable synthetic personalities through an experiment involving participants in a dyadic conversation scenario with a digital human, where the digital human's behavior is driven by its assigned personality. The results show that participants accurately perceive the artificial personality displayed by the digital human. We also demonstrate the potential of our robotic framework to bridge the gap between cognitive and psychological agents, as the findings highlight its ability to create a cognitively and emotionally intelligent digital human.

Personality and Memory-Based Framework for Emotionally Intelligent Agents

To enable sophisticated interactions between humans and robots in a shared environment, robots must infer the intentions and strategies of their human counterparts. This inference can provide a competitive edge to the robot or enhance human-robot collaboration by reducing the necessity for explicit communication about task decisions. In this work, we identify specific states within the shared environment, which we refer to as Critical Decision Points, where the actions of a human would be especially indicative of their high-level strategy. A robot can significantly reduce uncertainty regarding the human's strategy by observing actions at these points. To demonstrate the practical value of Critical Decision Points, we propose a Receding Horizon Planning (RHP) approach for the robot to influence the movement of a human opponent in a competitive game of hide-and-seek in a partially observable setting. The human plays as the hider and the robot plays as the seeker. We show that the seeker can influence the hider to move towards Critical Decision Points, and this can facilitate a more accurate estimation of the hider's strategy. In turn, this helps the seeker catch the hider faster than estimating the hider's strategy whenever the hider is visible or when the seeker only optimizes for minimizing its distance to the hider.

Planning with Critical Decision Points: Robots That Influence Humans to Infer Their Strategy

Despite the rise of mobile robot deployments in home and work settings, perceived safety of users and bystanders is understudied in the human-robot interaction (HRI) literature. To address this, we present a study designed to identify elements of a human-robot encounter that correlate with observed stress response. Stress is a key component of perceived safety and is strongly associated with human physiological response. In this study a Boston Dynamics Spot and a Unitree Go1 navigate autonomously through a shared environment occupied by human participants wearing multimodal physiological sensors to track their electrocardiography (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA). The encounters are varied through several trials and participants self-rate their stress levels after each encounter. The study resulted in a multidimensional dataset archiving various objective and subjective aspects of a human-robot encounter, containing insights for understanding perceived safety in such encounters. To this end, acute stress responses were decoded from the human participants' ECG and EDA and compared across different human-robot encounter conditions. Statistical analysis of data indicate that on average (1) participants feel more stress during encounters compared to baselines, (2) participants feel more stress encountering multiple robots compared to a single robot and (3) participants stress increases during navigation behavior compared with search behavior.

Human Stress Response and Perceived Safety During Encounters with Quadruped Robots

This study employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore perceptions of sex robots. Utilizing grounded theory, a thematic analysis revealed three primary themes: uncanny, artificial, and curious. Following this, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the dimensionality of these themes. Regression analyses were then performed to examine the influence of individual differences on these dimensions. The findings indicated that females perceived sexbots as more uncanny, older individuals perceived sexbots as more artificial, Americans were more curious about sexbots than the British, and males were more curious about sexbots, particularly the female sexbots.

Premium content

Downloads

Next from IEEE RO-MAN 2024

HRI Wasn't Built in a Day: A Call to Action for Responsible HRI Research

Similar lecture

Hierarchical Motion Planning Framework for Manipulators in Human-Centered Environments