HRI 2014 - 2014 Workshop on Multimodal, Multi-Party, Real-World Human-Robot Interaction

The development of robots capable of interacting with humans has made tremendous progress in the last decade, leading to an expectation that in the near future, robots will be increasingly deployed in public spaces, for example as receptionists, shop assistants, waiters, or bartenders. In these scenarios, robots must necessarily deal with situations that require human-robot interactions that are short and dynamic, and where the robot has to be able to deal with multiple persons at once.
To support this form of interaction, robots typically require specific skills, including robust video and audio processing, fast reasoning and decision making mechanisms, and natural and safe output path planning algorithms. This physically embodied, dynamic, real-world context is the most challenging possible domain for multimodal interaction: for example, the state of the physical environment may change at any time; the input sensors must deal with noisy and uncertain input; while the robot platform must combine interactive social behaviour with physical task-based action such as moving and grasping.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers from a range of relevant disciplines in order to explore the challenges and solutions for multimodal interaction in this area from different perspectives.
Invited speakers
Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland,
(Another speaker to be confirmed)
History of the workshop
This workshop builds on two previous meetings in the area of multimodal, multi-party human-robot interaction.
A workshop at the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2013 on the topic of Robots in public spaces: towards multi-party, short-term, dynamic human-robot interaction.
A tutorial at ICSR 2011 entitled Joint action for social robotics: how to build a robot that works together with several humans
The previous events addressed this research area from the perspective of social human-robot interaction; for this workshop, we continue this theme but focus on the multimodal capabilities required to support interaction in this context.