Robotics and AI Special Issue on Social Human-Robot Interaction (sHRI) of Human-Care Service Robots

With the advent of an increasingly aging society and the rapid increase of distributed or single-parent families, there are increasing demands for service robots with social intelligence to be integrated into our everyday lives to improve human-care services for aging people, people who need special care, and people living alone. A consequence of this increasing demand is that robots need to have greater capabilities for social interaction and improved stable manipulability of humans and daily-use objects.

Most previous service robots have been designed to perform non-interactive and physical services such as cleaning, surveillance, delivery, etc. But now robots are intended to perform socially intelligent and interactive services like reception, guidance, emotional companionship, medical intervention and so on, which makes social human-robot interaction essential to help improve aspects of quality of life, as well as to improve the efficiency of human-care services.

We encourage submissions from diverse research fields, e.g. HRI design, social intelligence, decision making, social psychology, and robotic social skills etc., on realizing and evaluating social aspects of human-robot interaction in our daily lives. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Social dialogue generation for human-care services
• Short/long-term behavior recognition for social human-robot interaction
• Human intention reading based on social knowledge
• Social expression and interactive behaviors
• Social task modeling and management
• Social mediation between humans and robots
• User studies considering human factors
• Elderly care and monitoring
• Child care and monitoring