Workshop overview

The development of robots capable of interacting with humans has made tremendous progress in the last decade, leading to an expectation that in the near future, robots will be increasingly deployed in public spaces, for example as receptionists, shop assistants, waiters, or bartenders. In these scenarios, robots must necessarily deal with situations that require interactions that are short and dynamic, potentially with multiple persons at once.

To support this form of interaction, robots typically require specific skills, including robust video and audio processing, fast reasoning and decision making mechanisms, and natural and safe output path planning algorithms. This physically embodied, dynamic, real-world context is the most challenging possible domain for multimodal interaction: for example, the state of the physical environment may change at any time; the input sensors must deal with noisy and uncertain input; while the robot platform must combine interactive social behaviour with physical task-based action.

This workshop brings together researchers from a range of relevant disciplines to explore the challenges and solutions for multimodal human-robot interaction from different perspectives. This workshop is the third in a series of meetings organised around this theme. Details of previous events can be found on the PubRob website.

Invited speakers

Papers

The official proceedings for this workshop are available from the ACM Digital Library. A workshop report is also available. (Note that the ACM has abbreviated this workshop MMRWHRI'14.)

Long paper Towards Closed Feedback Loops in HRI: Integrating InproTK and PaMini [paper]
Birte Carlmeyer, David Schlangen, and Britta Wrede
Long paper Attention Detection in Elderly People-Robot Spoken Interaction [paper]
Mohamed A. Sehili, Fan Yang, and Laurence Devillers
Long paper Advances in Wikipedia-based Interaction with Robots [paper]
Graham Wilcock and Kristiina Jokinen
Late-breaking abstract Towards Proactive Robot Behavior Based on Incremental Language Analysis [paper]
Suna Bensch and Thomas Hellström
Late-breaking abstract Affective Feedback for a Virtual Robot in a Real-World Treasure Hunt [paper]
Mary Ellen Foster, Mei Yii Lim, Amol Deshmukh, Srini Janarthanam, Helen Hastie, and Ruth Aylett
Late-breaking abstract Applying Topic Recognition to Spoken Language in Human-Robot Interaction Dialogues [paper]
Manuel Giuliani, Thomas Marschall, and Manfred Tscheligi
Late-breaking abstract Selection of an Object Requested by Speech Based on Generic Object Recognition [paper]
Hitoshi Nishimura, Yuko Ozasa, Yasuo Ariki, and Mikio Nakano
Late-breaking abstract Applying Semantic Web Services to Multi-Robot Coordination [paper]
Yuhei Ogawa, Yuichiro Mori, and Takahira Yamaguchi
Late-breaking abstract Clarification Dialogues for Perception-based Errors in Situated Human-Computer Dialogues [paper]
Niels Schuette, John Kelleher, and Brian Mac Namee
Late-breaking abstract Self-calibration of Attendance Device to Adapt to Different Users and Environments [paper]
Andrés Trujillo-León and Fernando Vidal-Verdú

Programme committee