RO-MAN 2023 Special Session on “HRI in Academia and Industry: Bridging the Gap”

March 14th, 2023 Daniela Lopez de Luise
SPECIAL SESSION on “HRI in Academia and Industry: Bridging the Gap” @ IEEE RO-MAN 2023

 

IMPORTANT DATES

  • *NEW* Paper Submission Deadline: March 31, 2023 (AoE)

  • Notification of Acceptance: May 26, 2023

  • Final Paper Submission: June 30, 2023

 

AIM AND SCOPE

The use of robots that operate in spaces where humans are present is growing at a dramatic rate. We are seeing more and more robots in warehouses, on streets, and even in our homes. All of these robots will, as part of their primary function, interact with humans in some way. In order to be successful, their interactions with humans will have to be carefully designed. The field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has been growing at the intersection of robotics, AI, psychology, and a number of other fields. However, until quite recently, it has been a largely academic area, with university researchers proposing, implementing, and reporting on experiments at a limited scale. With the current increase of commercially-available robots, HRI is starting to make its way into industry in a meaningful way.

This special session is intended to bring together HRI researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry, to discuss how these areas are different in their needs and approaches, and to figure out how HRI researchers and practitioners in these areas can work together – How can we make academic HRI research and education more relevant to industrial needs? How can industry support and contribute to more science-focused HRI? The special session will attract contributions on four broad themes, outlined below, in an attempt to build a new community interested in how these two active areas of HRI research and practice can work more closely together, and support each other in practical terms. We welcome research and case study papers with at least one section devoted to addressing some of the questions outlined below in the discussion section. We also invite survey and position paper contributions that directly surveys or discusses some of the below questions.

  • The Constraints and Needs of HRI in Industry

    • What are the constraints of deploying HRI at scale in consumer robots?

    • What are the pressing HRI problems that the industry wants to solve? Why?

    • How do we measure the success of HRI in a consumer product?

    • What HRI research can we do in an industry setting that we can’t do in academia?

  • The Relevance and Innovation of Academic HRI

    • What are the constraints of HRI research in an academic environment?

    • What industrial or consumer applications drive interesting academic HRI research?

    • How do we measure the success of academic HRI beyond controlled experiments and p-values?

    • What HRI research can we do in an academic setting that we can’t do in industry?

  • Interaction between Academic and Industrial HRI: Publications, Conferences, Tools/Technology Resources, and Experiments

    • What are the constraints of publishing in industry, and how do we address them?

    • How can academic & industrial HRI researchers collaborate meaningfully across the IP boundary?

    • How can industry HRI research benefit more from science-driven approaches?

    • How can academic HRI research benefit more from real-world problems?

  • HRI Education and Training: What does Academia and Industry Need?

    • What does it mean to be an HRI researcher? What are required skill sets in industry & academia?

    • How should we be training future HRI researchers for industry and academic career paths?

    • Since HRI can touch on all aspects of a robot system, how much HRI should robot hardware and software developers know?

    • How can HRI researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds integrate successfully with hardware and software development teams? How much technical background do they need to know?

 

Contributions

The special session contributions will go through the same peer review process as regular track papers, and the accepted manuscripts will appear in the Ro-Man23 proceedings. 

Please follow the directions as provided in the conference website: http://ro-man2023.org/paperSubmission/papersubmission

In Steps 3 and 4, select “Special Session Paper” under the First Submission category, and enter the following code to submit to our session.

  • Special Session Submission Code: an7c7

Organizers

  • Hae Won Park (Amazon Lab126 and MIT)

  • Bill Smart (Amazon Lab126 and Oregon State University)

  • Ross Mead (Semio)

  • Chien-Ming Huang (Johns Hopkins University)

  • Anastasia K. Ostrowski (MIT)

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