FJA@ROMAN2014 > Call for Papers

Aim

The aim of this workshop is to allow researchers interested in joint action, roboticists but also philosophers and psychologists, to have a context for discussion about and progressive elaboration of a framework for human-robot joint action.

To achieve this goal, we propose to the community to tackle a common example (as it is sometimes done in robotics planning competition) with the goal to identify the capacities and skills needed for the successful performance of the joint action and to see which of these are present are present or missing in any of our architectures. This should enable us to build upon each other's experience to further develop ongoing work. We hope that this could be a first meeting in a series of workshop in the next years.

Topics

We are seeking to frame joint action, interesting topics include:

• joint goal establishment and negotiation
• planning when the goal is a joint goal
• joint goal / joint action description and modeling
• joint goal / joint action execution, monitoring, turn-taking and timing management
• agents world modeling and management (incl. theory of mind and shared knowledge)
• agents commitment
• what kind of communication during joint goal achievement and for what purpose

An illustrative example

Please feel free to play with this example since discussion is really welcome. However, it would be very useful if you clearly indicate in what way your work is helpful to deal with such an example, i.e. which "brick" your work could contribute to the framework.

A human and a robot have the goal to build a pile with 4 cubes and put a triangle at the top. One after the other, they should stack bricks in the expected order.Each agent has a number of cubes accessible in front of him and would participate to the task by placing its cubes on the pile. At the end, one of the agent should place a triangle at the top of the pile.

The initial state is the following:

Actions available for each agent are the following (with object = cube or triangle):

• take an object on the table
• take an object from the pile
• put an object on the pile
• give an object to the other agent
• support the pile

Each agent is able to infer the state of the world so it knows:

• where each object is
• if an object is reachable for itself
• if an object is reachable for the other one

Moreover, we assume each agent is able to observe the activity of the other. The expected final state could be one of the following:

Possible deviations could be that:

• an agent drops a brick on its side / in the opposite side
  • e.g. if the brick falls down on the opposite side so that it becomes unreachable for the intended agent to put it on the pile, consider whether the other agent should put the brick directly on the pile or give it to the intended agent
  • the pile collapses
  • ...

Moreover, during the execution of the task, a number of behaviors can arise, among all:

• Proactive behavior:
  • one agent could [be lead to] help the other one by supporting the pile while the other places a brick on it
  • "Inactive" behavior:
    • one agent does not act at all
    • "Incorrect" behavior:
      • one agent does not pile bricks in the correct order
      • one agent removes a correctly placed brick from the pile

Finally, a negotiation phase should arise at the end to decide who put the triangle on the pile.

Topics

We are seeking to frame joint action, interesting topics include:

• joint goal establishment and negotiation
• planning when the goal is a joint goal
• joint goal / joint action description and modeling
• joint goal / joint action execution, monitoring, turn-taking and timing management
• agents world modeling and management (incl. theory of mind and shared knowledge)
• agents commitment
• what kind of communication during joint goal achievement and for what purpose

Application format 

We are seeking several kinds of contribution, so you can whether:

• propose a description of an existing system and explain how it can be used in this context
• propose a description of an element, a brick that could be used in (a part of) this context
• propose a position paper where you explain from your point of view, what are the challenges and key elements that should be handle to solve this problem

We invite submission of short papers (max 4 pages) but any other form of submission is welcome in this first phase, too, since we are interested in any contributions that could stimulate a fruitful debate.

 Visit the submission page to leave your submission.

All papers will be reviewed by our program committee.