United States

We propose a reinforcement learning model for the physical human–robot interaction. Our model estimates the opponent’s changing policy using variational autoencoder and expresses the agent’s policy in a common latent space. We verified the performance of the model using two novel physical and competitive environments, push-hand game and air-hockey in the simulator. The latent space worked properly as policy information of the agent’s own policy and that of the opponent.

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

Competitive Physical Interaction by Reinforcement Learning Agents Using Intention Estimation

opponent modeling

physical human-robot interaction

reinforcement learning

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

panel

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

Hand disinfection is important in preventing infectious diseases. However not everyone sanitizes their hands, and many people don’t rub hands for a long enough time. For these reasons we designed a robotic interface for automatic hand sanitizer dispensers to motivate people to disinfect their hands better. In our in-the-wild studies we have found that using our system resulted in 21% more hand sanitizations and a much longer hand rubbing time, which leads to better hygiene and prevention of infectious diseases.

Integrating a Social Robot in Higher Education – A Field Study

This trial involved an automated social robot in a health clinic to collect health data and provide personalized feedback on four key factors: exercise, diet, alcohol and cigarette use. A total of 47 patients completed a 20-minute health questionnaire with a Pepper Robot. Patients reported being as comfortable to discuss health-related topics with a robot or human for exercise, diet, alcohol, cigarette use, and mental health. Program evaluation received moderate ratings for ease of use, usefulness and motivation to change.

The Effects of Robot’s Facial Expressions on Children’s First Impressions of Trustworthiness

The paper describes the Nao_PRM application aimed at expanding the limited functionality of the simulated Nao robot, already integrated into the Choregraphe application, creating a robot simulation with all the required functionalities for social interaction.

Efficient, Situated and Ontology based Referring Expression Generation for Human-Robot collaboration

This project relates to developing a framework for physiologically adaptive robotic scenarios. By exploring the designs of previously developed systems, we can better provide a general structure and multi-purpose tools to help facilitate the integration of physiological signals into HRI applications.

Hand-Motion-guided Articulation and Segmentation Estimation

Studies have shown that the appearance and movements of home robots may play key roles in the impression and engagement of users, opposed to recent rises in the smart speaker market. In this research, we conduct a user experiment with the aim of clarifying the elements required to evaluate the human impression of a robot's movements, based on the hypothesis that adequate movements may lead to better impressions and engagement.

Impression Evaluation of Robots Behavior When Assisting Human in a Cooking Task

We explored using human cognitive traits as predictive measures for human-robot team task performance. We developed several tests that quantify human cognitive traits, and analyzed the relationships between the test scores and performances on several human-robot team tasks.

Predicting Individual Human Performance in Human-Robot Teaming

We developed a new rule-based dialog system, which appropriately switches responses without interfering with human speech. The traditional rule-based part allows the system user to design and customize topics and conversation transitions easily. However, the system’s speech sometimes superimposes on human’s speech. To solve this problem, we installed turn-taking detection, which can detect the human speaker’s continuous speech, and a function to select response by using detection results. Practical experiment suggested that our system may enable smooth conversations.

Increasing Engagement with Chameleon Robots in Bartending Services

We introduce a Grasp Manifold Estimator (GraspME) to find object's grasp affordances directly in camera images. Predicting grasp manifolds has the advantage of generalizing to continuously infinitely many grasps, which is not the case when using other grasp representations. We approximate grasp manifolds via a set of keypoints and locate them in images using Mask R-CNN as a backbone. We rely on simulation data only and perform experiments on simple and complex objects, including unseen ones and real data.

GraspME - Grasp Manifold Estimator

We propose a learning system in which language is grounded in visual percepts without specific pre-defined categories of terms. We present a unified generative method to acquire a shared semantic/visual embedding that enables the learning of language about a wide range of real-world objects. We evaluate the efficacy of this learning by predicting the semantics of objects and comparing the performance with neural and non-neural inputs. We show that this generative approach exhibits promising results in language grounding without pre-specifying visual categories under low resource settings. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach is generalizable to multilingual, highly varied datasets.

Neural Variational Learning for Grounded Language Acquisition

Data-driven approaches for modeling human skeletal motion have found various applications in interactive media and social robotics. Challenges remain in these fields for generating high-fidelity samples and robustly reconstructing motion from imperfect input data, due to e.g. missed marker detection. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model to synthesize and reconstruct long horizon motion sequences conditioned on past information and control signals, such as the path along which an individual is moving. Our method adapts the existing work MoGlow by introducing a new graph-based model. The model leverages the spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) to effectively capture the spatial structure and temporal correlation of skeletal motion data at multiple scales. We evaluate the models on a mixture of motion capture datasets of human locomotion with foot-step and bone-length analysis. The results demonstrate the advantages of our model in reconstructing missing markers and achieving comparable results on generating realistic future poses. When the inputs are imperfect, our model shows improvements in the robustness of generation.

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Integrating a Social Robot in Higher Education – A Field Study

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