Call for Papers

Assistive Robotics covers currently a broad spectrum of research axis, from intelligent robots acting as a servant, secretary, or companion to intelligent robotic functions such as autonomous wheelchair navigation, embedded robotics, ambient intelligence, or intelligent spaces. The proposed workshop focuses on Robotics for people assistance with a particular focus on frail people. This major research issue will affect our lives in the near future. The purpose of this workshop is to gather researchers from various fields to discuss topics related to the challenging problems of assisting people in their everyday life. Topics related to social interaction, intelligent habitat, mobility assistance, healthcare and wellbeing will be covered. Fundamental and technological research particularly related to autonomous indoor vehicles, sensor and actuators networks, wearable and ubiquitous technologies, and humanrobot interaction, will be presented. The objective of the workshop is to provide a review and challenges of the relevant applications in Assistance and Service Robotics in a Human Environment.

As continuity of the first edition held at IROS’12, this workshop will consist of four sessions with one keynote speaker for each:

Service robots are used to secure and assist people in their everyday life, often to improve their autonomy. The observation of human behaviors and human-robot interactions, gives multimodal information on their physical, affective and cognitive state for the robot to provide an efficient assistance, as well as medical diagnostic or personal coaching. This issue needs numeric and/or symbolic pattern recognition methods and multidisciplinary expertise from various domains: robotics, medical, psychology, and cognitive science. Prominent research activities in Artificial Intelligence (knowledge management using ontologies, non monotonic reasoning, natural language, scene understanding, etc.) can be used in combination with data driven approaches. This will give the robots or the environment a semantic knowledge about activities and behaviors and enable them to react even in highly dynamic and uncertain environments. This session aims to address the general issue of human behavioral modeling and Human-Robot interaction analysis and how to adapt the nature and level of assistance as a function of task specification, user profile and multimodal human behavior.

Autonomous navigation and manipulation in populated environments still represent an important challenge for robotics research. Unlike static or controlled environments where global path planning approaches are suitable, highly dynamic environments present many difficult issues: the detection and tracking of the moving obstacles, the prediction of the future state of the world and the on-line motion planning and navigation. Moreover, navigating and manipulating among human implies to take into consideration social conventions and human behavior understanding. Spatial ontologies and semantic maps can be used to improve the capabilities and performance of autonomous robots navigation and manipulation planning in complex real-world scenarios. Indeed, semantic maps augment the spatial description with information about the objects populating the robots and human environment such as functionalities, events, etc. This session addresses key issues related to navigation and manipulation in human populated environments by focusing on the most relevant applications and research works in the domain.

Smart spaces like smart homes, offices, buildings and public spaces will enhance robots capabilities and the way they serve and assist humans. The seamless integration of robots, with indoor and outdoor wireless sensors and actuators, smart devices and software agents is becoming an active research domain of robotics that targets new innovative applications for assisting humans. Designing such services requires a middleware layer offering functionalities such as human behaviors recognition, multimodal human-robot interactions, objects and situation recognition, natural language processing, commonsense knowledge sharing, task planning and distributed control. This issue needs to deal with important challenges such as context awareness, self-adaptation and autonomic management of cloud robotic services. The objective of this session is to facilitate the discussions and build a bridge to strengthen the relationship between robotics community and researchers working in the fields of networked robotic systems, pervasive/ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and cloud computing.

This session focuses on the presentations of national and international initiatives, innovative and/or industrial solutions for the assistance of frail people. This interactive session will provide an excellent opportunity to share information between experts from different fields such as medical, social, caregivers, etc. Applications concern the new technologies in the field of assistive robotics that influence everyday activities of elderly and disabled people. This session will be a real opportunity for people to present their work and to interactively exchange their experience with the audience.

The solicited papers address particularly the following topics:

• Elderly care assistive robots
• Mobility aids for locomotion or navigation
• Automated manipulation systems
• Robot companion
• Social interaction
• Multi-modal human-machine interfaces for assistive robotics
• Interaction control of assistive robots
• Human Behavioral modeling, Human locomotion
• Activity monitoring systems, Activity recognition
• Rehabilitation system, transfert machine
• Wearable robots: Exoskeletons, actuated orthosis and prostheses
• Mechatronic design and control of human movements
• Sensor networks, Actuator networks, Domotics, Distributive robotics
• Multi-modal perception, new sensors
• Cognitive ubirobots
• Context and Intention awareness
• Ambient Intelligence and smart spaces
• Middleware and networked robots
• Cloud robotics
• Ethical issues for assistive robotics

Three to four submissions will be accepted per session for oral presentations based on their quality, originality, and relevance to the related session. A poster/demo session is also planned in the workshop program. All accepted papers will published on the workshop website. Authors of selected papers will be asked to submit extended versions of their papers for a special issue in Elsevier Robotics and Autonomous Systems journal. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication anywhere else. Submission of papers and review process will be handled through EasyChair conference management system.

Session1: Behavioral modeling and Human/Robot Interaction Analysis
Keynote Speaker: Jesse HOEY, University of Waterloo, Canada

Session 2: Navigation and manipulation in human populated environments
Keynote Speaker: Kai O. ARRAS, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

Session 3: From sensors/actuators networks to cloud robotics
Keynote Speaker: Norihiro HAGITA, ATR Lab, Japan

Session 4: Robotics for elderly and frail people
Keynote Speaker: Takashi YAMAMOTO, Toyota Motor Corporation

• Bessam ABDULRAZAK, University of Sherbrooke, Canada
• Rachid ALAMI, CNRS-LAAS, France
• Michael BEETZ, TU Munchen, Germany (Invited)
• François BREMOND, Inria, France
• François CHARPILLET, Inria, France
• Raja CHATILA, CNRS-ISIR, France (Invited)
• Mohamed CHETOUANI, ISIR, UPMC, France
• Matei CIOCARLIE, Willow Garage, California, USA
• Anind DEY, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Michel DIAZ, CNRS-LAAS, France
• Charles FATTAL, CENRob, France
• Philippe FRAISSE, University of Montpellier, France
• Eugenio GUGLIELMELLI, Università Campus Bio-Medico, Roma, Italy (Invited)
• Jean-Michel GRACIES, Dept. of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, CHU MONDOR, France
• Birgit GRAF, Fraunhofer IPA, Germany
• Ryan HICKMAN, Google Research, USA (Invited)
• Fumiya IIDA, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Ning JIANG, Georg-August University, Germany
• Abderrahmane KHEDDAR, JRL CNRS, Japan
• Jong-Hwan KIM, KAIST, Korea
• Kyoungchul KONG, Sogang University, Seoul Korea
• Christian LAUGIER, Inria, France
• Kin Huat LOW, Nanyang Tech. University, Singapore
• Ren LUO, National Taiwan University, Taiwan (Invited)
• Eric MATSON, Purdue University, USA
• Jean-Pierre MERLET, Inria, France
• Juan MORENO, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
• Yoshihiko NAKAMURA, University of Tokyo, Japan
• Craig SCHLENOFF, National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, USA
• Katia SYCARA, Carnegie Mellon University, USA (Invited)
• Stewart TANSLEY, Microsoft Research, USA
• Dominique VAUFREYDAZ, Grenoble I.N.P, France
• Gentiane VENTURE, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan
• Nicola VITIELLO, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy

• Papers submission deadline: August 12, 2013 September 1, 2013 - (extended)
• Acceptance Notification: September 20, 2013 October 4, 2013
• Camera Ready deadline: October 4, 2013 October 11, 2013
• Registration deadline: see IROS website
• Workshop date: November 7, 2013

• David Daney, david.daney@inria.fr
• Yacine Amirat, amirat@u-pec.fr
• Anne Spalanzani, anne.Spalanzani@inria.fr
• Samer Mohammed, samer.mohammed@u-pec.fr
• Abdelghani Chibani, chibani@u-pec.fr
• Olivier Simonin, olivier.simonin@inria.fr