Benefits of Human - Robot Interaction [TC Spotlight]

The Technical Committee (TC) on Human - Robot Interaction (HRI) is 12 years old. The next ICRA in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, on 14-18 May 2012 will be the time for the TC triennial review. We propose that notwithstanding the many results achieved during the past years, the TC in HRI will continue to play an important role in coordinating activities related to HRI, consolidating HRI communities, and pushing research toward new and underexplored areas. We envision several possible directions for future research: 1) new research for developing smart and natural human-robot interfaces 2) increasing the interdisciplinary nature of research in HRI by enlarging the HRI community, especially by linking and coordinating activities with sister groups such as human-computer interaction or human-machine interaction 3) investigating further the social impact of HRI 4) promoting field tests on HRI 5) new knowledge on performance evaluation and benchmarking. We invite all people with an interest in HRI to send us their ideas about future directions, activities, and proposals for renewing this TC.