Dear all,
RO-MAN2020 has just finished. We would like to thank you for participating in this virtual edition of the "29th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication”.
The pandemic made us transform RO-MAN into a digital conference. It was not our desire to do that. Nonetheless, we got some benefits, such as the enormous number of free attendees and the possibility of making all the on-demand contents available on the platform for a longer period.
This year RO-MAN has had excellent participation with:
These numbers make us happy and proud of what we have achieved in this difficult and challenging period.
We would like to hear your thoughts about the conference providing us insights for the organization of future virtual conferences: https://forms.gle/w3ygJCJ8uF7TGenr5
Thanks to all the Organizing Committee, Chairs, Authors, Reviewers, Speakers, and Sponsors. We hope that soon conferences will go physical again.
We wish great success to RO-MAN 2021 (https://ro-man2021.org) and invite you to join IEEE-RAS, RSJ, and KROS societies’ activities.
The virtual conference will be hosted on underline.io.
Instructions for using the platform are available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ly5FyL3Wo.
The RO-MAN 2020 General Chairs and the Steering Committee have decided to take this year's conference fully virtual. Following a careful assessment of the uncertainty due to the pandemic evolution and its impact on international travel and people's safety, it has been inevitable to make this difficult decision.
Despite the international crisis, we have received a number of submissions greater than in previous years. This was a great sign of how lively and resilient our community is. In the coming months, we will work hard to restructure the program for a virtual event following the IEEE guidelines and also taking from other conference experiences. We will soon identify an online platform and plan activities to actively engage the participants and try to recreate the sense of community that deeply characterizes the RO-MAN conference.
We will update the website and advertise on social media to get you involved in every detail of the program. We sincerely hope to see you all very soon when this emergency will be behind us.
We understand that you may be disappointed to miss the opportunity to enjoy the conference in the unique landscape of Naples. In this regard, we are already looking to organize the RO-MAN conference in the future, to make the committee's work concrete and finally welcome you all to this beautiful city.
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of the robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
The fruitful interaction of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics is currently leading the Robot and Human Interactive Communication community towards new frontiers where perceptual, reasoning, manipulation, and interaction capabilities are effectively deployed in real word applications.
Still, there are several research challenges to be addressed. Firstly, the robot mind can be enhanced by a heart, so social and emotional capabilities are required to complement every single robotic functionality. It is not just a matter of performing an interaction task correctly, but mainly of performing such tasks in a way that is believable and acceptable to humans.
The user's experience with the robot is key to its large-scale adoption. Companies need to build solutions rooted in a deeper analysis of humans' specificities.
At the same time, academia needs to nurture the development of an extended research community with a set of interdisciplinary skills to investigate the required robot's capabilities for interactive communication with human beings, for defining decision, machine learning algorithms, and cognitive architectures to appropriately adapt the robot's behavior to the social context.
Finally, such new bootstrap in robotic technologies for everyday life will require a soul, so to address social, legal, and ethical issues that arise by the uptake robots in personal domains, as such skills are fundamental to achieve technological innovation which aligns with social, ethical and legal values, in the direction of an ELSE (Ethical, Legal, Social, and Economic) Robotics.
Works that address open research problems with a clear view of the practical application, both from the point of view of a direct realization in the market and from the point of view of possible implications of such technologies are welcome.
The main conference will host presentations of original contributions including new methods, studies, designs, theories, and applications of Human-Robot Interactive Communication systems and technologies surrounding it. The workshops, tutorials, and interactive sessions will provide an opportunity for participants from academia and industry to focus on prospective topics. Expert Keynote speakers from academia, industry, end users and policy-making bodies will give plenary talks about emerging technologies, methods, R&D and Technological barriers to market in the domain. Special sessions will target specific topics and audiences.
