Collection

The road to successful HRI: trust, acceptance, ethics, social signals and AI

This Special Issue is based on the conjunction of the workshops SCRITA (Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human Robot Interaction) and TRAITS (The Road to a successful HRI: AI, Trust and ethicS) respectively organised at IEEE RO-MAN and ACM/IEEEHRI 2021 conferences. The design of natural human-robot dynamics is a key aspect for ensuring a successful and efficient lasting human-robot interaction (HRI). In particular, it is expected that a robot deployed in human populated environments not only needs to be able to successfully complete a task, involving perception, reasoning and decision-making of other agents and the surroundings, but also needs to show social intelligence to engage people in effective and natural interactions. In such interactions, robots and people need to be able to cooperate to reach a joint goal, which can only be achieved if people accept and trust robots to complete their task and prevent any potential harm (emotional or physical) to people, the environment and themselves. The agents involved need to correctly interpret each other's behaviour, and act accordingly. Finally, several studies have shown that socially aware robots are perceived more positively by people in social contexts and situations. Robots, therefore, should be able to understand and use people's direct and indirect modes of communication, such as verbal and non-verbal cues. Moreover, robots should be able to adapt their behaviours to satisfy people's needs (such as personality, emotions, preferences, habits), and incorporating reactive and predictive meta-cognition models to reason about the situational context (such as its own erroneous behaviours) and provide socially acceptable behaviours. This special issue will explore successful HRI from a multidisciplinary perspective and shape the design of robots, so that robots: 1) autonomously sense and react to the situation, people and the environment by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) techniques 2) such that people feel comfortable to interact with robots 3) and trust them to safely reach intended outcomes, and 4) by respecting ethical and legal principles. Submissions are invited from leading researchers in the fields including, but not limited, to the following topics of interest: ● Impact of social cues on trust in human-robot interaction ● The impact of social robots on acceptance in HRI ● Measuring trust in human-robot interaction ● Trust violation and recovery mechanism in HRI ● Effects of humans’ acceptance on trust of robots ● Humans sense of control and trust in robots ● Trust and assistive robotics ● Overtrust in robots ● Antecedent of trust and human-robot trust ● Enhancing humans trust in robots ● User profiling and trust in human-robot interaction ● Evaluation of human-robot interaction quality ● Human factors affecting successful HRI ● Mental models in HRI ● XAI in HRI ● Trustworthy AI ● Legal frameworks for trustworthy robotics ● Ethics implications in HRI

Editors

  • Alessandra Rossi

    postdoctoral researcher at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy). She has a PhD as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research ETN SECURE project (https://secure-robots.eu/) at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn. She is a Visiting Lecturer at University of Hertfordshire. Alessandra received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Naples Federico II. Her research interests include multi-agent systems, social robotics, Human–(Multi) Robot Interaction, home companion and user profiling.

  • Antonio Andriella

    Ph.D candidate at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI) in the Perception andNew Content Item Manipulation Group. Since 2017, he has held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship as part of an Innovative Training Network (ITN) called SOCRATES. Prior to joining IRI, he worked as AI expert at Cogisen for 8 years. His research interests are in the areas of human-robot interaction and human-centred design technologies for older adults with cognitive impairments.

  • Anouk van Maris

    Research associate in Responsible Robotics for the RoboTIPS project (RoboTIPSprojecthttps://www.robotips.co.uk/home) at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (UK). She focuses on designing an ethical black box to address the potential future ubiquity of social robots and concerns over the damage they might cause when they malfunction. She acquired her Ph.D. in Social Robot Ethics as an Early Stage Researcher of the MSCA-ITN project SOCRATES (http://www.socrates-project.eu/).

  • Patrick Holthaus

    Manager of the Robot House research facility at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). He is also a permanent Research Fellow in the Adaptive Systems Research Group and a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests include systems integration in heterogeneous environments, interaction architectures and behaviour coordination, and the social credibility of companion robots. He is currently an advisory board member of the Norwegian project “Human Interactive Robotics in Healthcare” and is a CoI of the UKRI TAS hub’s pump priming project “Kaspar explains”.

  • Sílvia Moros

    Visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). She completed her master’s in Robotics and Automation at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain, and is currently pursuing a master in Neuropsychology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain. Her research interests include mainly HRI, social robotics and neuroscience. She was co-organiser of the previous iterations of this workshop at the RO-MAN's 2018-2020 conferences and a guest editor of special issues on the same topic.

  • Marcus Scheunemann

    Visiting Research Fellow at the Adaptive Systems Research Group and a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. He studied Computer Science at the University of Ulm and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in Germany. He later obtained a PhD with the topic of "Autonomous and Intrinsically Motivated Robots for Sustained Human-Robot Interaction" from the University of Hertfordshire. His focus was on the fully autonomous behaviour generation for robots to interact with humans based on information-theoretic measures.

  • Gabriella Lakatos

    Research Fellow at the Adaptive Systems Research Group and a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. She completed her PhD in the field of Ethology at the Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary, after which she transferred her skills to the field of Etho-robotics and Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). Her research interests include HRI and robot-assisted therapy. She has expertise in the development of socially acceptable companion robots through the design of biologically inspired credible social behaviour.

Articles (8 in this collection)