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.