Workshop overview

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and mobile HCI to explore issues of mutual interest and act as a bridge between the two communities.

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. In these settings, robots must often deal with situations that require socially appropriate human-robot interactions of a specific nature: interactions that are short and dynamic, and where the robot has to be able to deal with multiple persons at once. In order to do so, 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. Mobility is also a key requirement in many of these systems and research in this area shares a number of challenges with the mobile HCI community, including the development of systems and infrastructures for mobile devices, and methods for studying human-robot interactions outside the lab. Issues related to the management of battery life, dynamically-changing conditions like lighting, and background noise must also be addressed. As a result, research on public space robots is often fundamentally different from other work in social robotics and HRI/HCI, but presents opportunities for cross-fertilisation between the HRI and mobile HCI communities.

This workshop is the fifth in a series of meetings (and the fourth workshop) organised around the theme of public space human-robot interaction. Details of previous events can be found on the PubRob website.

Papers and slides

Introduction Workshop introduction and overview [slides]
Mary Ellen Foster and Ron Petrick
Invited talk Exploring Human-Robot Interaction in Public Spaces: Lessons Learned [slides]
Astrid Weiss
Invited talk PAL Robotics [slides]
Francesco Ferro
Paper Exposing real-world challenges using HRI in the wild [paper] [slides]
Aaron Cass, Kristina Striegnitz, Nick Webb, and Venus Yu
Paper How can we transition from lab to the real world with our HCI and HRI setups? [paper] [slides]
Christian Dondrup, Lynne Baillie, Katrin Lohan, and Frank Broz
Paper Natural Language Generation for Public-Space Social Robots [paper] [slides]
Mary Ellen Foster
Paper BuldingBlocks: Head-mounted Virtual Reality for Robot Interaction in Large Non-Expert Audiences [paper] [slides]
Uwe Gruenefeld, Tim Claudius Stratmann, Lars Prädel, Max Pfingsthorn, and Wilko Heuten
Paper Where Can I Find a Pharmacy? - Human-Driven Design of a Service Robot's Guidance Behaviour [paper] [slides]
Päivi Heikkilä, Hanna Lammi, and Kathleen Belhassein
Paper Evaluation of interacting robots in public spaces through scientific competitions [paper] [slides]
Luca Iocchi, Daniele Nardi, and Mary Ellen Foster
Paper Experiential and Contextual Factors of Social Robots as Public Servants [paper] [slides]
Kirsikka Kaipainen, Aino Ahtinen, Aparajita Chowdhury, and Kaisa Väänänen
Paper Expanding the Target Population of a Museum Guide Social Robot [paper]
Johan Kildal and Ander Iriondo
Paper Towards Affective Drone Swarms in Public Spaces [paper]
Truong-Huy Nguyen, Kasper Grispino, and Damian Lyons