WORKSHOP: Social Remote Presence Robots

这笔资金将用于支持美国教师和研究生参加一个由国家科学基金会联合资助的关于人类与远程机器人互动的研讨会，该研讨会将于2010年11月30日和12月1日在加州的门洛帕克的杨柳车库举行。 在美国和日本，我们都看到了第一批成功的商业远程呈现机器人，但这些努力是初步的，主要涉及增加有限的室内移动性和将摄像头对准视频会议屏幕的能力。 为了实现该领域的潜力，迫切需要进行研究以更好地理解复杂的问题，例如远程社会体现的性质，机器人应该如何看起来像人类，远程机器人存在对用户和对话者的心理影响，什么样的用户界面减轻认知负荷，以及如何更好地支持情景感知。 远程存在研究的新方向可能包括其他机器人能力，如户外移动性和灵活性。 此外，还需要解决潜在的社会影响和伦理问题，特别是当远程呈现机器人技术被设计用于针对弱势群体的应用时（例如，儿童和老人）。 最后，远程呈现机器人具有全球性的影响，因为它们将允许来自不同文化和不同国家的人们进行身体和社会互动。 有一天，远程呈现机器人甚至可能被赋予来自多种文化的语言，文化和非语言交流线索的知识，以便它们可以进行多模式，完全体现的翻译。因此，这次日美联合研讨会既及时又重要。 它将建立在关于这个主题的两次初步会议的基础上，并汇集了一组不同的研究人员，他们可以从技术，人类和全球/社会的角度来讨论这些问题。 研讨会的参与者将分享他们的研究经验和发现，并确定一套挑战性的问题，可以指导在这一领域正在进行的研究。 更广泛的影响：将应邀参加研讨会。 日本代表团将由来自一些顶尖大学的人机交互领域的顶尖研究人员组成。 美国的参与者是经过精心挑选的，因为他们要么做过远程呈现机器人的研究，要么在特殊人群的背景下使用过社交机器人（例如，儿童、老年人、身体残疾者或有学习障碍的人），或者可以从社会或道德方面考虑。 组织者努力促进性别（一半的美国受邀者是女性）和种族（两个是亚洲人，一个是西班牙裔背景，一个是非洲裔美国人）的多样性。 还将包括大约10名研究生，以便为青年研究人员培养新的学习和培训经验;同样，选择将基于他们对研讨会主题的兴趣以及多样性考虑。 研讨会的主要成果将是一份白色文件，总结了会议产生的关键思想，包括应该定义该领域研究路线图的挑战性问题。 演讲材料将被收集并提供给参与者，目的是促进跨国际边界和学科的社区对话。

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.