Half-day workshop: “Robot Touch // Touching Robotics”

Half-day workshop at International Conference on Social Robotics 2024 (ICSR’24)

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/robottouch.

As robots start to inhabit our social spaces and come into close proximity to people, touch increasingly becomes a central element of human–robot interactions. Touch is already integral to several robotics applications within healthcare, assistive technology, rehabilitation, manufacturing, and entertainment. Robotic touch, however, raises not just technical challenges regarding safety and reliability, but equally significant questions surrounding its implications for individual users and culture at large.

The “Robot Touch // Touching Robotics” workshop seeks to engage participants in discussion of the salient aspects and critical issues surrounding touch in basic and applied robotics research from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The workshop’s main objectives are:

• To stimulate debate around robot touch across disciplinary boundaries
• To contribute towards developing a foundation for an interdisciplinary vocabulary, discourse, and understanding of the stakes involved in human-robot touch
• To raise as an issue how me might adequately think, describe, and conceptualize touch within interdisciplinary robotics research projects (basic as well as applied)
• To explore how technical and qualitative aspects of robot touch might be considered co-constitutive and what potential this perspective holds

The following main questions will be addressed:

• Which concepts and approaches do different fields and disciplines offer that are useful and relevant to understanding robot touch?
• What constitutes adequate interdisciplinary research methodologies for addressing robot touch in applied and basic research?
• What future visions of robot touch might we imagine, and what are the current prospectives and potential challenges of cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on robot touch?

Participation and Submission Guidelines

The workshop seeks to attract academics, researchers, practitioners, early career researchers, and PhD students working with or interested in robot touch as an interdisciplinary topic that spans engineering, robotics, the humanities, the social sciences, art, and design.

The scheduled activities include: Invited keynote talks by international domain experts including Louis-Philippe Demers; a thematic poster session; facilitated roundtable discussions.

Participation: Submission of work is encouraged but not a requirement to participate in the workshop. However,  in order to participate, attendees must register either for the full conference participation OR for the workshop-only access: https://icsr2024.dk/index.php/registration/ . In addition, participants are required to register for the workshop by sending an email to: touchingrobotics@gmail.com

Submission of work: An extended abstract for work to be presented in the poster session may be submitted to: touchingrobotics@gmail.com. The extended abstract should follow the Springer LNCS/LNAI style (also used for ICSR’24 papers) and have a length of 2-4 pages incl. references. Each contribution will undergo single-blind review by members of the program committee. Accepted abstracts will be published in the workshop proceedings, which will be made available on the workshop website. At least one author must register for the workshop to present a poster on-site.

Following the workshop, attendees will be invited to contribute to a jointly authored position paper on robot touch as an interdisciplinary subject of social robotics to be submitted to a relevant flagship journal (e.g. ACM THRI or Int. Journ. of Social Robotics).

Selected authors will also be invited to contribute papers to a planned edited volume and journal special issue.

Topics of Interest:

• Affective Robots and Affective Interaction Design
• Applications of Social Robots
• Care Robots and Assistive Robots
• Human-Robot Relationships
• Creative Robotics
• Cultural Robotics
• Embodiment, Empathy and Intersubjectivity
• Haptic Interaction and Haptic Interaction Design
• Philosophical Issues in Human-Robot Coexistence
• Prosthetics
• Rehabilitation Robotics
• Robot Aesthetics
• Robot Ethics
• Robots Designed for Touch (incl. Soft and Compliant Robots)
• Social Acceptance and Impact of Robots in Society

Organizing committee

• Jonas Jørgensen (University of Southern Denmark)
• Petra Gemeinboeck (Swinburne University)
• Rob Saunders (Leiden University and Swinburne University)
• Johanna Seibt (Aarhus University)
• Elizabeth Jochum (Aalborg University)
• Kathrin Maurer (University of Southern Denmark)
• Jonas Fritsch (IT University of Copenhagen)
  

Important Dates

• September 30, 2024 - Submission deadline (extended abstracts) 
• October 4, 2024 - Acceptance notification (extended abstracts)
• October 23, 2024 – Workshop

Venue

The workshop will be held in Odeon Cultural Center in Odense, Denmark, in conjunction with ICSR2024

Contact

All questions about submissions or other matters should be sent to: touchingrobotics@gmail.com

Acknowledgement

The workshop is supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) (Grant no.: 3186-00027B).