2021 IEEE/RSJ IROS Workshop: Cognitive and Social Aspects of Human Multi-Robot Interaction

Meeting: September 27, 16:10–18:10 CEST (SEP 27, 10:10am-12:10 ET US) at HALL 4, gCON

Pre-recorded talks are available online; please see the below publication and talk list with video links.

The IROS 2021 conference is fully online as for the workshop. The presentation of each speakers will be available through the conference website. However, a live slot is planned on September 27, 16:10-18:10 (CEST) and can be joined through a link comminated by the conference.

Motivation

The last 30 years have witnessed significant progress in Robot swarms and multi-robot systems (MRS). These systems incorporate multiple robots, possibly with diverse perceiving and executing capabilities, which are put together in collaborative settings to achieve a common goal. Swarm and MRS have been used to serve a variety of real-life applications such as victim rescue, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, and multiple ground target tracking. These tasks cannot be executed by single-robot systems due to requirements for diverse specialization, spatial distribution, or temporal requirements imposing the need for parallelization. Despite the great potential and unique qualities these systems have, they lack human-like intelligence that enables them to work under full autonomy. As such, the human element must be involved due to its so far unmatched cognitive abilities which enable a human to ensure the alignment between system operations and mission objective, set priorities, detect failures, and intervene to fix errors. In the foreseeable future, when robot capabilities advance, it is expected that humans will still take part in these systems due to ethical and accountability considerations. However, due to the multi-agent characteristics bringing in accumulated uncertainty and increased complexity, it is challenging to establish effective collaboration between humans and robots.

First, a human has limited cognitive resources, making it difficult to simultaneously supervise multiple robots, respond to their requests, and identify their faults. Second, human users vary in their ability to assess team performance and detect behavior abnormality. In this workshop, the objective is to explore the cognitive and social aspects in human multi-robot system (MRS) interaction. Our intent is to take inspiration and learn from the broad base of researchers in the humans-robots collaboration scenarios.

Topics of Interest

This is a full day workshop, which will comprise a mixture of presentations covering a number of relevant topics including:

• Trust measurement, modeling, and maintenance

• Safety in MRS and human-swarm interaction

• Distributed cognition (or distributed cognitive systems)

• Human cognitive load measurement

• Transparency and explanation in MRS

• Modeling and analysis human-swarm interaction

• Social acceptance, norms, and ethical issues in human environments

• Autonomy dependency

• Cognitive control for heterogenous teaming.

• Shared decision making in multi-robot multi-human interaction

• Datasets and simulator kits

• New applications related to intuitive human-MRS/swarm interaction

• Self-learning and healing in human MRS/swarm interaction

Invited Speakers

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Organizer

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Rui Liu, Ph.D. (rliu11@kent.edu), Assistant Professor, Cognitive Robotics and AI (CRAI) lab, College of Aeronautics and Engineering (CAE), Kent State University, Ohio USA. https://ruiliurobotics.weebly.com/

Wenhao Luo, Ph.D., ( wenhao.Luo@uncc.edu), Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.  https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/wenhaol/

Jianjun Meng, Ph.D., (mengjianjunxs008@sjtu.edu), Associate Professor, Institute of Robotics, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai China https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ahr8ZzsAAAAJ&hl=zh-CN

Changjoo Nam, Ph.D., (cjnam@inha.ac.kr), Assistant Professor, Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering, Inha University, Korea https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=H_2cbhsAAAAJ&hl=en

Aya Hussein, Ph.D., (z5139608@ad.unsw.edu.au), Research Associate, School of Engineering & IT, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jeyuwyMAAAAJ&hl=en

Alyssa Pierson, Ph.D., (pierson@bu.edu), Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department, Boston University, Boston, USA  https://alyssapierson.com/

Call for Contributions

We invite interested participants to submit short papers 1~4 pages and previously published papers for the contribution talks of 10 minutes. Please send your abstract to hmrs.iros2021@gmail.com relevant to interested topics. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact the organizers via email.

• Submission to Email: hmrs.iros2021@gmail.com

• Call for Contents: Short abstract 1-4 pages; full-length paper 6 pages; previously-published papers are also encouraged to submit.

• Format of submission: IEEE conference format 

• Workshop Day: September, 27th, 2021

Program Schedule

The talks are however divided conveniently into sessions. In each session, invited speakers will give us vision and academic work introduction; then pre-recorded presentation videos will be displayed in each session; then questions and answering will be conducted in the end of each session. 

The panel discussion will take place during the live session, in the time slot indicated above. We invite all attendees to attend and contribute their questions and perspectives!

Accepted Papers

Support & Endorsement

We appreciate the strong support from 

• IEEE RAS “Multi-Robot System” Technical Committee. Endorsement letter is attached.

• IEEE RAS “Cognitive Robotics” Technical Committee. Endorsement letter is attached.

Sponsorship

We appreciate the funding sponsorship from two robotics companies “Clobot”(https://clobot.co.kr) and “ROAS” (https://roas.co.kr) in Korea. 

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