During the last decades we have seen the emergence of increasingly autonomous humanoids, capable of performing complex tasks in the human environment. As these machines are meant to cooperate and to naturally interact with humans, researchers have started to investigate what makes robots to be perceived as human-like, in terms of their appearance, motor skills, cognitive abilities, and how this human-likeness can affect social human-robot interaction.
The goal of this workshop is to depict the current state of the art concerning the development of social interaction skills in humanoid robots, and to sketch the main challenges and future directions.
More specifically, we will try to answer the following questions:
- what is human-likeness in humanoid robots?
- which are the aspects of human-likeness that are more relevant for interaction?
- should robots develop and learn in the same way as humans do in order to be perceived as human-like?
- which aspects of the Uncanny Valley beyond the mere appearance should be taken into consideration? Motor control? Cognitive abilities? Communication skills?
- what are the aspects of human-human interaction that can/should be implemented in the human-robot context?
We foster a multi-disciplinary discussion, which aims at understanding how roboticists can take advantage of collaborations with psychologists, primatologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists to realize humanoid robots able to interact naturally with humans.
Moreover, we are interested in analyzing how different field of robotics can provide useful solutions to realize robot behaviors that support a human-like human-robot interaction.
Therefore, we intend to bring together researchers from different robotics fields, namely social robotics, humanoid robotics, cognitive developmental robotics, robot design, motor learning and control, in order to stimulate an interesting discussion about how human-like social interaction can be achieved in humanoid robots, by considering the different aspects that co-exist in the creation of such complex machines.
