FJA@ROMAN2016 > Home

A workshop held in conjunction with the 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), August 26 - 31, 2016 at Columbia University, Teachers College in New York City. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from several disciplines to discuss the development of frameworks for thinking about and designing human-robot joint action.

For more than a decade, the field of human-robot interaction has generated many valuable contributions of interest to the robotics community at large. The field is vast, going all the way from perception (e.g., tactile or visual) to action (e.g., manipulation, navigation) and decision (e.g., interaction, human-aware planning). However, when it comes to the development of future robot assistants or robotic team-mates in mixed human-robot teams, there is a need for a deeper understanding of human-robot joint action that could provide a framework for the different contributions and studies.

It is interesting to observe, from a roboticist point of view, that human joint action is a topic of intense research in cognitive psychology and philosophy. This observation led us to start a multi-disciplinary initiative to create a unique opportunity for scientific exchange. Psychologists and philosophers can present recent developments in joint action research, while roboticists are able to discuss the challenges they face with regard to human-robot interaction and more precisely human-robot joint activity.

Our goal is to bring various aspects of existing work together and examine how they can help us define the kind of integrative framework needed for the design of an autonomous robot that can engage in long-term interaction with a human partner. This framework should be able to serve two complementary purposes. On the one hand, it should help us define with precision what a robot needs to understand about the human it interacts with for the interaction to be successful and thus what capacities the robot should be equipped with to ensure it can build this understanding. On the other hand, the robot also needs to be understood by its human partner and this framework should help us clarify how this understanding operates and what is needed to enable the robot to behave appropriately and in a way that manifests what it is doing to the human partner.

More precisely, during this workshop, we will study the common ground needed around joint action execution, its components, its representation and installation and the way it evolves during joint action (e.g. alignment issue, coordination).

Keynote Speakers

Herbert Clark (Stanford University, USA)

Tamara Lorenz (Univ of Cincinnati, USA)