CFP

SIERA24: Studying Incidental Encounters with Robotic Autonomy 2024

IEEE RO-MAN 2024

Pasadena, CA, United States, August 30, 2024

Conference website	https://hri-siera.github.io/
Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=siera24

Studying incidental encounters with robots in public spaces represents not just a pressing ethical concern, but also a distinct and exciting scientific challenge for HRI that can deeply shape robots, their behavior, and the experiences they produce in public spaces. This workshop convenes researchers and practitioners with experience or interest in incidental encounters with autonomous robots, particularly those occurring in public or shared spaces.

Background

Incidental, unplanned, ad-hoc encounters [e.g. 5, 7, 16 , 19] between humans and robots are an increasingly common yet poorly-understood (and often not-designed for) scenario within HRI [3, 4 , 8, 13 , 14]. In a workshop organized for the ACM/IEEE HRI’20 conference, Rosenthal-von der Pütten et al. [17] labeled those who unexpectedly encounter robots in the course of their daily lives incidentally copresent persons (InCoPs), noting that, at the time of writing in 2020, there was no accepted term for this important group in HRI.

Studying incidental human-robot encounters builds upon research on group-robot interactions [2 , 20 ], HRI in long-term autonomy [ 11 ], the complexities of achieving lasting social engagement [6 , 12 ] in HRI more broadly. A growing body of research (e.g. [ 13, 15]) demonstrates that robots are still poorly equipped to interact with InCoPs and is beginning to reveal how HRI can respond.

Workshop Agenda

Two breakout sessions will facilitate discussion on topics of mutual interest. The organizers will seed potential breakout topics drawn from invited speakers, contributed talks, and discussions during the event. Participants will be able to propose additional topics if desired. Discussion groups of 4-8 people will then contribute to a moderated plenary discussion at the end of each breakout session. Changing group composition will promote cross-pollination of ideas and is intended to facilitate conversation during the conference and beyond.

List of Topics

We invite innovative contributions on any topic relevant to the workshop’s goals, including (but not limited to):

empirical studies of incidental encounters with robotic or embodied autonomy
survey- or interview-based research on perceptions of incidental robot-encounters
robotic autonomy for incidental encounters
robot perception of human body language, eye gaze, and affective state during incidental encounters
autonomous generation of eye gaze, body language, or other non-functional motion during incidental encounters
research methods for studying incidental encounters with autonomous embodied agents
metrics of social compliance of behavior during incidental encounters
theoretical models of human-robot encounters
conversational interaction during incidental encounters with robots
incidental encounters with non-robotic autonomy
influences of setting, robot morphology, or robot task on influence human-robot encounters
group dynamics of human-robot encounters

Submission Guidelines

Papers must be prepared using the IEEE template used for the conference.

There are two lengths of papers accepted, including references:

short work-in-progress and position papers (2-4 pages). Short papers will be lightly reviewed for fit with the workshop theme.
long-format integration and experimental papers (4-6 pages). ong-format papers will be lightly reviewed for fit with workship theme and will receive constructive feedback. These submissions should generally present unpublished or in-progress work. Extensions of existing work to encounter scenarios and public settings are also welcome.

Authors of accepted long-format papers will receive first consideration for presentations of their work during the event. All authors of accepted papers will be invited to give brief introductions of their interest and work to facilitate discussion during the event.

Submissions need not be anonymized; reviews will be single-blind. Authors may be asked for voluntary reviews of other submissions.

Submissions will be made available on the workshop website. Authors may opt out of this.

Organizers

Elliott Hauser, University of Texas at Austin
Yao-Cheng Chan, University of Texas at Austin
Hannah Pelikan, Linköping University
Swapna Joshi, Northeastern University Institute of Experiential Robotics
Stuart Reeves, University of Nottingham

All questions about submissions may be emailed to Elliott Hauser (eah13@utexas.edu).

Venue

The workshop is part of IEEE RO-MAN 2024 in Pasadena, CA, USA. Authors should register for the conference and indicate their intention to attend

Support

This workshop is supported by a International Collaborations Grant from Responsible AI UK, TAS Hub Good Systems, a UT Grand Challenge, and NSF Grant #2219236.

References

[1] Anna M H Abrams, Pia S C Dautzenberg, Carla Jakobowsky, Stefan Ladwig, and Astrid M Rosenthal-von der Pütten. A Theoretical and Empirical Reflection on Technology Acceptance Models for Autonomous Delivery Robots. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI ’21, pages 272–280, New York, NY, USA, March 2021. Association for Computing Machinery.

[2] Anna M H Abrams and Astrid M Rosenthal-von der Pütten. I–C–E framework: Concepts for group dynamics research in human-robot interaction. Advanced robotics: the international journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, 12(6):1213–1229, December 2020.

[3] João Avelino, Leonel Garcia-Marques, Rodrigo Ventura, and Alexandre Bernardino. Break the Ice: a Survey on Socially Aware Engagement for Human- Robot First Encounters. Advanced robotics: the international journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, 13(8):1851–1877, January 2021.

[4] Franziska Babel, Johannes Kraus, and Martin Baumann. Findings From A Qual- itative Field Study with An Autonomous Robot in Public: Exploration of User Reactions and Conflicts. International Journal of Social Robotics, July 2022.

[5] Niklas Bergstrom, Takayuki Kanda, Takahiro Miyashita, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita. Modeling of natural human-robot encounters. In 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 2623–2629, September 2008.

[6] P S C Dautzenberg, G M I Voß, S Ladwig, and A M Rosenthal-von der Pütten. Investigation of different communication strategies for a delivery robot: the positive effects of humanlike communication styles. In 2021 30th IEEE Interna- tional Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pages 356–361. ieeexplore.ieee.org, August 2021.

[7] Christian Dondrup, Christina Lichtenthäler, and Marc Hanheide. Hesitation signals in human-robot head-on encounters: a pilot study. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, HRI ’14, pages 154–155, New York, NY, USA, March 2014. Association for Computing Machinery.

[8] Elliott Hauser, Yao-Cheng Chan, Parth Chonkar, Geethika Hemkumar, Huihai Wang, Daksh Dua, Shikhar Gupta, Efren Mendoza Enriquez, Tiffany Kao, Justin Hart, Reuth Mirsky, Joydeep Biswas, Junfeng Jiao, and Peter Stone. "What’s That Robot Doing Here?": Perceptions Of Incidental Encounters With Autonomous Quadruped Robots. In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trust- worthy Autonomous Systems, number Article 12 in TAS ’23, pages 1–15, New York, NY, USA, July 2023. Association for Computing Machinery.

[9] Laura Hoffmann, Nikolai Bock, and Astrid M Rosenthal-von der Pütten. The Peculiarities of Robot Embodiment (EmCorp-Scale): Development, Validation and Initial Test of the Embodiment and Corporeality of Artificial Agents Scale. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Inter- action, HRI ’18, pages 370–378, New York, NY, USA, February 2018. Association for Computing Machinery.

[10] Laura Kunold, Nikolai Bock, and Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten. Not all robots are evaluated equally: The impact of morphological features on robots’ assess- ment through capability attributions. ACM transactions on human-robot interac- tion, 12(1):1–31, March 2023.

[11] Lars Kunze, Nick Hawes, Tom Duckett, Marc Hanheide, and Tomáš Krajník. Artificial Intelligence for Long-Term Robot Autonomy: A Survey. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):4023–4030, October 2018.

[12] Hee Rin Lee, Eunjeong Cheon, Chaeyun Lim, and Kerstin Fischer. Configuring Humans: What Roles Humans Play in HRI Research. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI ’22, pages 478–492. IEEE Press, March 2022.