Special issue on Robotic Co-workers: Psychological and Cognitive Safety in Human-robot Interactive Social Environments - IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Development Systems

*Important Dates*

31 December 2019 – Deadline for manuscript submission

15 Apr 2020 – Notification of authors

15 May 2020 – Deadline for revised manuscripts

15 July 2020 – Final version

Guest Editors*

Dr. Trung Dung Ngo

University of Prince Edward Island, Canada,

tngo@upei.ca

Dr. Rachid Alami

LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France 

Rachid.Alami@laas.fr

Dr. Takayuki Kanda
Kyoto University, Japan

kanda@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Dr. Goldie Nejat

University of Toronto, Canada

nejat@mie.utoronto.ca

Dr. Yongsheng Ou

SIAT, Chinese Academy of Science, China

ys.ou@siat.ac.cn

*Aim and Scope*

In the vision of a cyber-society, humans and robots will closely collaborate to perform given tasks. Robots will automate mundane tasks and let humans focus on higher-order jobs requiring more cognitive skills. In this trend, professional and personal service robots are enabling assistive technologies in human-robot shared workspaces. However, the first and the most challenging issue with respect to deploying developmental and cognitive robots in human populated environments is how to guarantee human physical and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces. Physical safety is about how to maintain a minimum physical distance between robots and humans, which is obviously necessary to deploy autonomous robots in human populated environments, while cognitive safety implies that robots should not cause stress and discomfort to humans when working with or around them. Human risks and their inconveniences when working in an interactive social environment essentially come from unavoidable situations due to robot malfunctioning operations caused by either misunderstanding and misinterpreting information extracted from sensing and perception or failures of path planning and motion control. Furthermore, humans may feel uncomfortable as well as fearful and stressful towards collaborative robots as such robots don’t behave in the natural way of humans with respect to their social situations, contexts, and cultures. It is important to find out a methodological approach for incorporating social signals, cues, and norms into developmental perception, cognitive reasoning and motion planning of the robot control architecture so that the robot is capable of securing human psychological and cognitive safety when interacting and collaborating with humans to perform tasks in human-robot shared workspaces.

*Themes*

The Special Issue aims to address challenges and methodologies of how to deal with psychological and cognitive safety in order to accelerate deployment and adoption of developmental and cognitive robots into human-robot shared workspaces. The ultimate goals of this special issue are to (1) to address the state-of-the-art research (2) and to generate an avenue for researchers to disseminate their recent research findings in the perspective of psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workplaces.

This special issue targets on all aspects of guaranteeing psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot interactive social environments with, but not limited to, the following topics: 

Current state-of-the-art: future perspective of developmental and cognitive robots with concerns of ethics and rules for human psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces.

Perception for psychological and cognitive safety: capacity and roles of human face and body detection and tracking, human gestures and posture recognition, social cues and signal detection and identification, human-object interaction and human group interaction detection and tracking in satisfying psychological and cognitive safety. 

Cognitive reasoning, motion planning and control: methodological development of human aware robot navigation, collaborative task performances in dynamic social environments with concerns of psychological and cognitive safety.

Machine learning for developmental and cognitive robots: using learning by demonstration, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and hierarchical learning to enhance psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workplaces.

Ergonomic studies of developmental and cognitive robots: developmental and cognitive factors and benchmarks, evaluation methods, objective and subjective measurement metrics, experiments and validation methods for psychological and cognitive safety.

Applications domains: concerns of psychological and cognitive safety when working with developmental and cognitive robots in public places, light industry, digital manufacturing, and transformed manufacturing.

*Submission Guideline*

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the “Information for Authors” of the journal found at https://cis.ieee.org/publications/t-cognitive-and-developmental-systems/tcds-information-for-authors and submissions should be done through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee and please select the category “SI: Psychological and Cognitive Safety”.