Overview

The societal challenges arising from a diminished workforce of caregivers and nurses due to declining birth rates and increased life expectancy are significant. A potential solution lies in the automation of assistive tasks through the use of robots. However, the caregiving environment presents a particularly intricate operational setting for robots. In such contexts, tasks may involve direct interaction with individuals who are frequently frail or disabled. 

Unlike traditional manipulation scenarios where objects are assumed to be rigid, the caregiving environment introduces soft and deformable objects, including but not limited to bed sheets, clothes, and towels. Physical interaction is only half of the story, social interaction in elderly care is of equal importance. Socially assistive robotics involves designing robots that can interact with humans in a social context, understanding and responding to high-level social cues. With the emergence of LLMs and VLMs, their integration with socially assistive robots presents new challenges such as bias and fairness. We envision that a robot should have an intuitive and expressive general-purpose language/vision understanding model to assist human with daily tasks.

This workshop is taking a holistic approach to consider assistive robots that include both physical and socially assistive robots, as one may well inform the other. We aim to invite roboticists from diverse backgrounds to discuss, interact, and debate on pressing challenges of assistive robots for caregiving, to pave the way to advance the field of research.

Important information 

• Date: July 15, 2024

• Room: "ME F -Stevin" (https://esviewer.tudelft.nl/space/18)

• Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MGRiNTdkZWItNjdkNC00Zjk1LWFhNDYtY2RiMTk3ZDI0NDgy%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%222b897507-ee8c-4575-830b-4f8267c3d307%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22ffcdc2ac-18f6-4885-9836-c3db5c1eae46%22%7d

Call for Contributions

Participants are encouraged to submit their research for presentation at the workshop. The submitted papers should be no more than 2 pages (excluding references and appendix) and should follow the RSS paper format. Submitted papers will be reviewed by the organizing committee. Accepted papers will be hosted on the workshop website and presented in poster and spotlight sessions. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Social Interaction

• LLM/LVM in assistive robotics

• Multimodal sensing (visual, force, capacitance, tactile, etc) for assistive manipulation

• Personalization and safety in HRI context

• Long-horizon assistive manipulation tasks

• Simulation environment for caregiving and sim-to-real transfer learning

• Data-efficient perception and assistive manipulation

• Fail-safe strategies for assistive manipulation

• Virtual/Augmented Reality User Interfaces for assistive manipulation

Papers submission: Researchers interested in presenting their work during the workshop can submit 2 pages of abstract in the RSS format. Please note that it is possible to use material that has already been presented in a previous conference. Abstracts will be reviewed by the organizers. Papers could be submitted via e-mail to: fan.zhang@honda-ri.de or jihong.zhu@york.ac.uk. Please include "Call for Papers: RSS WS on Learning for Assistive Robots" in the email subject line.

“Blue Sky” papers: 

We seek “Blue Sky” submissions (two pages in RSS format) that present a novel high-level perspective of the challenges associated with learning for assistive robotics. Preference will be given to early career academics—senior graduate students, postdocs, and young researchers in academia and industry. Please include “[Blue Sky]” in the paper title.

Presentation instructions 

Poster presenters will have to prepare a 1-slide presentation to briefly present their contribution during the "Poster Teasers" and an A0 poster in portrait orientation to be presented during the "Poster Session".

Schedule

• 08:45 am - 09:00 am Introduction Remarks - Fan Zhang

• Session 1 - chair: Jihong Zhu

• 09:00 am - 09:20 am Invited Talks 1: Stephen James

• 09:20 am - 09:40 am Invited Talks 2: Yiannis Demiris 

• 09:40 am - 10:00 am Invited Talks 3: Ahmed Al-Hindawi

• 10:00 am - 10:30 am Coffee Break

• 10:30 am - 10:35 am Presentation of accepted papers: Allan Wang (remote)

• 10:35 am - 10:40 am Presentation of accepted papers: Alberto Muñoz

• 10:40 am - 10:45 am Presentation of accepted papers: Atuhurra Jesse  (remote)

• 10:45 am - 10:50 am Presentation of accepted papers: Peng Wang  (remote)

• 10:50 am - 11:30 am Panel 1: Perspective from Academy / Industry / Clinics (Stephen James, Yiannis Demiris, Ahmed Al-Hindawi)

• Session 2 - chair: Zackory Erickson (remote) and Jihong Zhu (in person)

• 11:30 am - 11:50 am Invited Talks 4: Michael Gienger (remote)

• 11:50 am - 12:10 pm Invited Talks 5: David Abbink

• 12:10 pm - 12:30 pm Invited Talks 6: Júlia Borràs Sol

• 12:30 pm - 14:00 pm Lunch

• 14:00 pm - 14:20 pm Invited Talks 7: Yixing Gao

• 14:20 pm - 14:50 pm Panel 2: Learning in Assistive Robotics (Júlia Borràs Sol, Yixing Gao)

• Session 3 - chair: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee

• 14:50 pm - 15:10 pm Invited Talks 8: Luis Figueredo

• 15:10 pm - 15:30 pm Invited Talks 9: Jose Barreiros

• 15:30 pm - 16:00 pm Coffee Break

• 16:00 pm - 16:05 pm Presentation of accepted papers: Khai Nguyen (remote)

• 16:05 pm - 16:45 pm Panel 3: Challenges in Assistive Robotics (Luis Figueredo, Jose Barreiros)

• 16:45 pm - 17:00 pm Conclusion Remarks - Fan Zhang

Accepted Papers

• Memory-Maze: Benchmark and Visual Language Navigation Model for Guiding Blind People, Masaki Kuribayashi, Kohei Uehara, Allan Wang, Daisuke Sato, Simon Chu and Shigeo Morishima

• A Robot Learning System for Viewpoint-aware Legible Motion Planning, Khai Nguyen, Yi-Hung Chiu, Prakrit Tyagi, Saurav Kambil and Inseung Kang

• [Blue Sky] LLM Granularity for On-the-Fly Robot Control, Peng Wang, Mattia Robbiani, Zhihao Guo

• [Blue Sky] Enhancing Teleoperated Robotic Systems through Multimodal and Virtual Reality Sensing, Nieto, N.; Sanchez, J. A.; Aguirre, M. G.; Felix, F.; Munoz, L. A

• [Blue Sky] The Impact of Large Language Models on Social Robots: Potential Benefits and Challenges, Atuhurra Jesse