Organizing a workshop on Human safety and Comfort in Human-Robot Interactive Social Environments at the International Conference on Social Robotics, Tsukuba, Japan, November 2017

We are organizing a half-day workshop on "Human safety and Comfort in Human-Robot Interactive Social Environments" at the International Conference on Social Robotics, Tsukuba, Japan, November 2017. A detailed info and program of this workshop can be seen below:

Aim and Scope:
Service robots are becoming enabling assistive technologies as co-workers and helpers in human-robot interactive social environments. However, the first and the most challenging issue to deploy service robots in human populated environments is how to guarantee human safety and comfort in human-robot shared workspaces. Human physical safety is concerned with how to maintain the minimum physical distance between robots and human while human psychological safety implies that robots are not allowed to 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 attack of the robots due to malfunctioning operations caused by either misunderstanding and misinterpreting information extracted from sensing and perception or failures of path planning and motion control. Hence, such functional components and their incorporation play crucial roles on securing human physical and psychological safety in human-robot interactive social environments. 

This half-day workshop aims to create a forum for researchers who are interested in human safety and comfort in human-robot interactive social environments. We welcome open discussions on all aspects of guaranteeing human safety and comfort in human-robot interactive social environments with, but not limited to, the following topics: 

• Current state of the art of human safety and comfort in human-robot interactive social environments 
• New hardware and software for human safety and comfort
• System design and integration for human safety and comfort
• Safety rules for human safety in human-robot shared workspaces (beyond the Proxemics – Hall’s model)
• Human-robot interaction studies focusing on safety and comfort
• Ethics for human safety and comfort
• Human face and body detection and tracking
• Human gesture and posture recognition
• Human detection and tracking techniques
• Human-object interaction detection and tracking
• Human interacting group detection and tracking
• Sensor fusion techniques to extract social cues and signals
• Learning algorithms for interpretation of social signals and cues in contexts
• Human aware robot navigation techniques
• Human avoiding and approaching techniques
• Human-robot interaction in proximities
• Path planning and motion planning for mobile service robots in social environments
• Robot navigation in dense human crowds
• Control engineering applied for services mobile robots
• Real-time control and optimization of robot operations in social environments
• Applications of mobile service robots in social environments 

Organizers:

• Goldie Nejat, University of Toronto, Canada (nejat@mie.utoronto.ca) 
• Yongsheng Ou, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, China (ys.ou@siat.ac.cn) 
• Takayuki Kanda, ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan (kanda@atr.jp) 
• Rachid Alami, LAAS-CNRS, TMBI, Univ. Toulouse, France (Rachid.Alami@laas.fr) 
• Xuan Tung Truong, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (xuantung.truong@gmail.com) 
• Trung Dung Ngo, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (tngo@upei.ca)