WORKSHOP: Social Remote Presence Robots

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This is funding to support participation by faculty and graduate students from the United States in a jointly funded NSF-JST workshop on the topic of human interaction with remote presence robots, to be held November 30 and December 1, 2010, in Menlo Park, California at Willow Garage. In both the U.S. and Japan we are seeing the first successful commercial remote presence robots, but these efforts are rudimentary and primarily involve adding limited indoor mobility and the ability to direct a camera at a video conference screen. For the potential of the field to be realized, research is sorely needed to better understand complex issues such as the nature of remote social embodiment, how human-looking the robots should be, the psychological impacts of remote robot presence for the user as well as the interlocutor, what sorts of user interfaces mitigate cognitive load, and how to better support situational awareness. New directions in remote presence research could include other robot abilities such as outdoor mobility and dexterity. In addition, potential societal impacts and ethical considerations need to be addressed, especially when telepresence robot technologies are designed for applications targeting vulnerable populations (e.g., children and the elderly). Finally, telepresence robots have global implications, in that they will allow people from different cultures and different countries to interact both physically and socially. Someday, telepresence robots may even be endowed with knowledge of language, culture, and non-verbal communication cues from multiple cultures so that they can carry out multimodal, fully embodied translation. Thus, this joint Japanese-U.S. workshop is both timely and important. It will build upon two prior preliminary meetings on the topic, and bring together a diverse set of researchers who can speak to the issues from a technical, human, and global/societal standpoint. Workshop participants will share their research experiences and findings, and identify a set of challenge problems that can guide ongoing research in this field. Broader Impacts: Participation in the workshop will be by invitation. The Japanese delegation will consist of leading researchers in human-robot interaction from some of their top universities. U.S. participants have been carefully selected because they either have done research in tele-presence robots, have worked with social robots in the context of special populations (e.g., children, the elderly, the physically disabled, or people with learning disabilities), or can speak to societal or ethical considerations. The organizers have taken pains to promote diversity with respect to gender (half of the U.S. invitees are women) and ethnicity (two are Asian, one is of Hispanic background, and one is African American). About ten graduate students will also be included in order to foster new learning and training experiences for young researchers; again, the selection will be based on their interest in the workshop topic and also on diversity considerations. The primary workshop outcomes will be a white paper that summarizes the key ideas resulting from the meeting, including challenge problems that should define a research roadmap for the field. Presentation materials will be gathered and made available to participants, with the goal of fostering a community dialog that crosses international boarders and academic disciplines.