Italy

The success of the interaction between the robotics community and the users of these services is an aspect of considerable importance in the drafting of the development plan of any technology. This aspect becomes even more relevant when dealing with sensitive services and issues such as those related to interaction with specific subgroups of any population. Over the years, there have been few successes in integrating and proposing technologies related to deafness and sign language. Instead, in this paper, we propose an account of successful interaction between a signatory robot and the Italian deaf community, which occurred during the Smart City Robotics Challenge (SciRoc) 2021 competition \footnote{https://sciroc.org/}. Thanks to the use of a participatory design and the involvement of experts belonging to the deaf community from the early stages of the project, it was possible to create a technology that has achieved significant results in terms of acceptance by the community itself and could lead to significant results in the technology development as well.

IEEE RO-MAN 2022

An Autonomous Conversational Android that Acquires Human-Item Co-Occurrence in the Real World

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
 [![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/af259abe105b3791c498ae1552d75710.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18w73BZPB_JVOgcrcdZDqYpEupwVt4CnU/view?usp=sharing)

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31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

technical paper

Cohesive human-robot collaboration (HRC) for carrying out an industrial task requires an intelligent robot capable of functioning in uncertain and noisy environments. This can be achieved through seamless and natural communication between human and robot partners. Introducing naturalness in communication is highly complex due to both aleatoric variability and epistemic uncertainty originating from the components of the HRC system including the human, sensors, robot(s), and the environment. The presented work proposes the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered multimodal, robust fusion (AI-MRF) architecture that combines communication modalities from the human for a more natural communication. The proposed architecture utilizes fuzzy inferencing and Dempster-Shafer theory for deal with different manifestations of uncertainty. AI-MRF is scalable and modular. The evaluation of AI-MRF for safety and robustness under real-world mimicking case studies is showcased. While the architecture has been evaluated for HRC in industrial settings, it can be readily implemented into any human and machine communication scenarios.

Fuzzy Based Control of a Flexible Bevel-Tip Needle for Percutaneous Interventions

In the literature, perceptual deadband approach
based on the Weber’s law of perception has been employed
to reduce haptic data (i.e., force) rate for a typical teleoperation
application. The approach selects only those samples
for transmission which lie outside the perceptual deadband.
The existing structure of the deadband has linear decision
boundaries and assume that the just noticeable differences
(JNDs) for increasing and decreasing change in a reference force
stimulus are similar. This paper questions this assumption and
searches for an asymmetric perceptual deadband using a datadriven
approach. For the purpose, we design an experimental
setup for collecting human haptic responses (perceived and nonperceived)
of several users for a force range [3, 5] N. A machine
learning classifier inspired from the Weber’s law is trained to
predict the labels of the responses and define a generalized
linear perceptual deadband for each user. The results show
that the generalized deadband do provide different increasing
and decreasing JND (i.e., pointing towards asymmetry in force
perception), but fails to improve the data reduction significantly
as compared to the existing symmetric one

An affordable system for the teleoperation of dexterous robotic hands using Leap Motion hand tracking and vibrotactile feedback

While user-centered design philosophy and corresponding design recommendations are central pillars of human-robot interaction (HRI) research, the process how to move from such abstract and generalized design recommendations to concrete, context-specific design implementations remains under-researched and vague in the literature. The goal of this paper is therefore to show an approach for moving from abstract design recommendations to a concrete interface, and thus illustrates a design process that is rarely illustrated in concrete terms in HRI. This is done using a real-world use case of designing a possible user-centered interface for mobile cooperative manufacturing robots for assembly work in a medium-sized company. A study is presented to conceptualize and test a Research-through-Design approach, which combines transdisciplinary methods to determine relevant information which should be displayed on a graphical user interface (GUI) for HRI. Based on the use case, a Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA) was conducted, consisting of a participatory observation and interviews with subject matter experts to analyze an assembly task from the work objective to the information units. The acquired information has been transferred to a physical model. A wireframe has been created to show how the results of the GDTA and the physical model can be applied to a GUI. The wireframe design has been evaluated through qualitative interviews with end users (n = 12) to get first estimates about its relevance. In order to validate the applied methods, design and engineering students (n = 10) repeated the process in stages followed by interviews. The results indicate that the method mix shows potential and leads to supportive user interfaces.

Learning Human Actions Semantics in Virtual Reality for a Better Human-Robot Collaboration

In this paper, we introduce Ommie, a novel robot that supports deep breathing practices for the purposes of anxiety reduction. The robot’s primary function is to guide users through a series of extended inhales, exhales, and holds by way of haptic interactions and audio cues. We present core design decisions during development, such as robot morphology and tactility, as well as the results of a usability study in collaboration with a local wellness center. Interacting with Ommie resulted in a significant reduction in STAI-6 anxiety measures, and participants found the robot intuitive, approachable, and engaging. Participants also reported feelings of focus and companionship when using the robot, often elicited by the haptic interaction. These results show promise in the robot’s capacity for supporting mental health.

Leveraging Cognitive States in Human-Robot Teaming

Human gaits constitute significant health information because they indicate body function conditions, such as sensory, motor, and cognitive functions. Monitoring gait patterns helps to find weakened body parts and to prevent diseases before they become serious. In this paper, we propose a novel method to monitor human gaits in indoor environments by using a mobile robot and artificial intelligence. A mobile robot periodically collects 3D skeleton data by using an installed depth camera, and the collected data are used to extract gait parameters and to classify normal, antalgic, stiff-legged, steppage, lurching, and Trendelenburg gaits via the proposed system. Ultrawideband (UWB)-based localization with Kalman filtering and odometry-based state estimation is adopted to allow a mobile robot to rapidly and accurately reach the target human. We use both 3D skeletons and joint-based angle data to achieve improved pathological gait classification performance. A bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) architecture is adopted for fusion at the feature level. An accuracy of 97.64% is achieved by using the proposed multiple-input model, whereas 96.63% and 94.17% accuracies are achieved by the skeleton- and joint-based angle input models, respectively. The proposed automatic gait analysis method can contribute to improving untact smart home care and quality of life.

Domestic Social Robots as Companions or Assistants? The Effects of the Robot Positioning on the Consumer Purchase Intentions

The rapid spread of COVID-19 around the globe has increased the need to adopt autonomous social robots within our healthcare systems. In particular, socially assistive robots can help to improve the day-to-day functioning of our healthcare facilities including long-term care, while keeping residents and staff safe by performing repetitive tasks such as health screening. In this paper, we present the first human-robot interaction study with an autonomous multi-task socially assistive robot used for non-contact screening in long-term care homes. The robot monitors temperature, checks for face masks, and asks screening questions to minimize human-to-human contact. We investigated staff perceptions of 7 attributes: screening experience without and with the robot, efficiency, cognitive attitude, freeing up staff, safety, affective attitude, and intent to use the robot. Furthermore, we investigated the influence of demographics on these attributes. Study results show that, overall, staff rated these attributes high for the screening robot, with a statistically significant increase in cognitive attitude and safety after interacting with the robot. Differences between gender and occupation were also determined. Our study highlights the potential application of an autonomous screening robot for long-term care homes.

Tolerating Untrustworthy Robots: Studying Human Vulnerability Experience within a Privacy Scenario for Trust in Robots

Understanding the decisions of AI-driven systems and the rationale behind such decisions is key to the success of the human-robot team. However, the complexity and the ``black-box'' nature of many AI algorithms create a barrier for establishing such understanding within their human counterparts. Reinforcement Learning (RL), a machine-learning algorithm based on the simple idea of action-reward mappings, has a rich quantitative representation and a complex iterative reasoning process that present a significant obstacle to human understanding of, for example, how value functions are constructed, how the algorithms update the value functions, and how such updates impact the action/policy chosen by the robot. In this paper, we discuss our work to address this challenge by developing a decision-tree based explainable model for RL to make a robot's decision-making process more transparent. Set in a human-robot virtual teaming testbed, we conducted a study to assess the impact of the explanations, generated using decision trees, on building transparency, calibrating trust, and improving the overall human-robot team's performance. We discuss the design of the explainable model and the positive impact of the explanations on outcome measures.

Explainable Reinforcement Learning in Human-Robot Teams: The Impact of Decision-Tree Explanations on Transparency

Social robots are increasingly used in different services such as education, hospitality, healthcare, and elderly care. These robots are often adopted to provide people with information and guidance, which sometimes can be quite different from people’s expectations. Therefore, it is important to understand whether similar or dissimilar opinions or attitudes of a focal subject held by the user and robot affects the user’s perception of the robot and future adoption intentions. We propose that robot design (positive facial expressions and verbal sentiments) may moderate the effect of attitude dissimilarity on robot perception. It is well-documented in the psychology literature that attitude similarity affects human-human relationships; however, no such study has been undertaken in human-robot interactions. Our results showed that when the robot expressed its views using a neutral facial expression and verbal sentiment, attitude similarity influenced robot perception, i.e., those participants who had similar (vs. dissimilar) attitudes as the robot perceived the robot to be positive (vs. negative). However, when the robot expressed its opinion with a positive facial expression and verbal sentiment, participants judged the robot as positive regardless of attitude similarity between the user and the robot. These results indicate that positive facial expressions and the verbal sentiment of a robot can nullify any negative effect when a user and a robot share very different opinions. 

Positive Facial and Verbal Sentiments of a Social Robot Mitigates Negative User Perceptions in Attitudinally Dissimilar Interactions

To assist and protect citizen communities and police officers, robots have been developed for situational responses (e.g., explosive ordinance disposal). However, the robots used by law enforcement are typically expensive, can be difficult to operate, and do not readily facilitate communication between individuals. Recent research by the authors examined how communication impacts trust between robots and humans in the context of law enforcement. Using a mobile communication robot, law enforcement officers (LEOs) reported high levels of trust because the robot provided near face-to-face interaction using screens, microphones, and speakers. This paper seeks to expand upon the previous findings by discussing public perception, privacy, safety, and ethical considerations as they pertain to communication robots utilized in law enforcement. In the following, the authors explain their primary research thrusts and provide their plan for expanded stakeholder involvement for future research. For the future work, the authors will work with stakeholders to develop ethically grounded communication robots and accompanying education programs that enhance communication, trust, transparency, and accessibility between LEOs and citizens communities.

Socially Assistive Robotics and Wearable Sensors for Intelligent User Dressing Assistance

Social robots that are able to express emotions can potentially improve human's well-being. Whether and how they can learn from interactions between them and human being in a natural way will be key to their success and acceptance by ordinary people. In this paper, we proposed to shape social robot Haru affective behaviors with predicted continuous rewards based on received implicit facial feedback via human-centered reinforcement learning. The implicit facial feedback was estimated with the valence and arousal of received implicit facial feedback using Russell’s circumplex model, which can provide a more accurate estimation of the subtle psychological changes of human user, resulting in more effective robot behavior learning. The whole experiment is conducted on the desktop robot Haru, which is primarily used to study emotional interactions with human in different scenarios. Our experimental results show that with our proposed method, Haru can obtain a similar performance to learning from explicit feedback, eliminating the need for human users to get familiar with training interface in advance and resulting in an unobtrusive learning process.

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An Autonomous Conversational Android that Acquires Human-Item Co-Occurrence in the Real World

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Fuzzy Based Control of a Flexible Bevel-Tip Needle for Percutaneous Interventions

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