Special Sessions

Special Sessions

Interactive Session on Tactile and Haptic Interface

Objectives

Tactile and haptic interfaces have become an indispensable research topic for human-robot communication. However, oral presentation or paper does not allow us to touch and feel the achievement. Therefore, this special session focuses on interactive exhibit of tactile and haptic interfaces. The topic ranges from tactile and haptic display, tactile sensor, to the applications of these interfaces that allow human and robot to touch the world.

Session

This special session will be included Interactive Oral Sessions.

Organizers

• Hiroyuki Kajimoto (the University of Electro-Communications, kajimoto<at>hc.uec.ac.jp)
• Masaya Takasaki (Saitama University, masaya<at>mech.saitama-u.ac.jp)

Human-Robot Imitation and Teaching

Objectives

As robots become more integrated into society by being introduced from industrial into domestic spaces that are shared with humans, the possibility for them to take advantage of this social context for learning tasks and transferring skills, in more ecient ways than individual learning (trial and error), slowly becomes a reality.

Besides the technical considerations of capturing and understanding the human behavior (including goal inference and action understanding), there is also the issue of human expectations and anticipations and how these should be addressed by the robots, in order to achieve a more natural human-robot interaction - a human perspective that needs to be addressed along with the `system perspective'.

This proposed half-day special session aims to present the latest research from both perspectives, concerning how principles from imitation and social learning, as well as the way that people naturally approach teaching, can be applied to teaching robots new skills, or adapting already known ones.

Session

• Tue A2 (September 29 Tue., 11:10-12:30, 2F 202)

Organizers

• Dr. Aris Alissandrakisa (alissandrakis<at>myk.dis.titech.ac.jp)
  • Dept. of Computational Intelligence & Systems Science, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science & Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn (K.Dautenhahn<at>herts.ac.uk)
  • Adaptive Systems Research Group, The University of Hertfordshire
• Prof. Dr. Yoshihiro Miyake (miyake<at>dis.titech.ac.jp)
  • Dept. of Computational Intelligence & Systems Science, Interdisciplinary Graduate

Emotional Closed-Loop Systems

Objectives

Emotions and affect have been a research topic in human-computer interaction since almost two decades now. Expectations about emotionally enriched communication approaches are manifold. Performance and intuitive interaction issues are elementary considerations, whereas, safety and feeling comfortable have been questions of more recent interest. In this context predictability of the human-in-the-loop communication/interaction situation is fundamental prerequisite and requires understanding of the complete and closed chain of human and robot functional elements, where emotions and their propagation are integrated components. This special session, as the first instance of a series of organized sessions, brings together works from different fields as emotion modeling and recognition, decision and planning issues as well as psychological and (neuro-)physiological aspects and as such tries to support a wholistic view on the complete emotional closed-loop mechanism from a systems perspective.

Session

• Tue B2 (September 29 Tue., 14:50-16:10, 2F 202)
• Tue C2 (September 29 Tue., 16:30-17:50, 2F 202)

Organizers

• Kolja Kuehnlenz (koku<at>tum.de)
  • Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer, Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, Technische Universitaet Muenchen

Ethics on Robotics Applications for Daily Life

Objectives

As research on robots for daily-life fields is increasing, the importance of ethical issues is also increasing, such as influences to children in schools and at home, accountability for the elderly and disabled people in caring applications. The special session discusses about ethical problems of representative robotics applications in daily life.

Session

• Wed A2 (September 30 Wed., 11:10-12:30, 2F 202)

Organizers

• Tatsuya Nomura
  • Department of Media Informatics, Ryukoku University, Japan

Interaction Design for Adaptation

Objectives

Currently various agents including home robots, life-like agents have been developed and are coming into common use in our daily life. Many people enjoy playing and do cooperative tasks with them. In the situation, we consider that the key property is adaptability, that is, the agents should be adaptive in order to realize automatic customization to a user, and can be played with for a longer period without boredom if they are adaptive. For realizing adaptive agents, it is necessary to 1) design interaction for adaptation, that is, design interaction among a human, an agent, and their environment that provokes rich and natural interaction, and 2) develop algorithms that learn from the interaction data. We, robotics, AI and cognitive science researchers need to contribute to design and implement such interaction.

We call this topic IDEA (Interaction DEsign for Adaptation). And we have organized this session from RO-MAN 2005 by gathering many researchers from several different fields. Since we want to keep the activity of IDEA, we also hold an organized session which ocuses on IDEA in RO-MAN 2009.

Session

• Wed B2 (September 30 Wed., 14:50-16:10, 2F 202)
• Wed C2 (September 30 Wed., 16:30-17:50, 2F 202)

Organizers

• Seiji Yamada
• Takanori Komatsu
• Naoyuki Kubota
• Yugo Takeuchi
• Michita Imai

Cognitive Intelligent Mechatronics

Objectives

Superficially mimicking of human discriminative behavior cannot build a true intelligent human-machine system. For realization of such intelligent mechatronics system, an adequate balance between science approach and engineering approach are required since one clarifies the human advanced information processing such as cognition, and the other enables to implement such function into a machine by utilizing the knowledge obtained by the scientific study.

Based on such convictions, we would like to organize a special session involving cognitive research for an intelligent mechatronics, and to provide a space for discussing the related topics for realization of such cognitive intelligent machine. Main factors for the cognitive intelligent mechatronics appear to be nonverbal communication, social communication, estimation of intention, and recognition of human action; hence, this special session was organized with the following papers that relate to these issues.

Session

• Thu C2 (October 1 Thu., 14:30-15:50, 2F 202)
• Thu D2 (October 1 Thu., 16:10-17:30, 2F 202)

Organizers

• Satoshi Suzuki (ssuzuki<at>fr.dendai.ac.jp)
  • Tokyo Denki University, Japan
• Fumio Harashima
  • Tokyo Denki University, Japan