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Recent advances in multi-agentic systems (e.g., AutoGen, OpenAI Agents) allow users to interact with a group of specialised AI agents rather than a single general-purpose agent. Despite the promise of this new paradigm, the HCI community has yet to fully examine the opportunities, risks, and user-centred challenges it introduces. We contribute to research on multi-agentic systems by exploring their architectures and key features through a human-centred lens. While literature and use cases are still emerging, we build on existing tools and frameworks available to developers to identify a set of overarching challenges, e.g., orchestration and conflict resolution, that can guide future research in HCI. We illustrate these challenges through examples, present potential design considerations, and provide research opportunities to spark interdisciplinary conversation. Our work lays the groundwork for future exploration and offers a research agenda focused on user-centred design in multi-agentic systems.

Office Assistant Robots (OARs) offer a promising solution to proactively provide in-situ support to enhance employee well-being and productivity in office spaces. We introduce OfficeMate, a social OAR designed to assist with practical tasks, foster social interaction, and promote health and well-being. Through a pilot evaluation with seven participants in an office environment, we found that users see potential in OARs for reducing stress and promoting healthy habits and value the robot's ability to provide companionship and physical activity reminders in the office space. However, concerns regarding privacy, communication, and the robot's interaction timing were also raised. The feedback highlights the need to carefully consider the robot's appearance and behaviour to ensure it enhances user experience and aligns with office social norms. We believe these insights will better inform the development of adaptive, intelligent OAR systems for future office space integration.

Robots powered by AI and machine learning are increasingly capable of collaboration and social interaction with humans, leading to a demand to develop new approaches to ensure their transparency and explainable behaviour. As explainable AI (XAI) seeks to clarify AI decisions, its integration into physical robots often creates an illusion of explainability—raising questions about whether current approaches truly enhance understanding. The 3rd Workshop on Explainability in Human-Robot Collaboration aims to address the real-world concerns associated with developing explainable and transparent robots through a focused, multi-faceted panel discussion and a series of paper presentations. In this workshop, we will focus on refining when and how explanations should be provided, integrating human communication principles to enhance trust and transparency in human-robot collaboration through both technical and user-centred solutions.

Implicit communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration (HRC), where contextual information, such as intentions, is conveyed as implicatures, forming a natural part of human interaction. However, enabling robots to appropriately use implicit communication in cooperative tasks remains challenging. My research addresses this through three phases: first, exploring the impact of linguistic implicatures on collaborative tasks; second, examining how robots' implicit cues for backchanneling and proactive communication affect team performance and perception, and how they should adapt to human teammates; and finally, designing and evaluating a multi-LLM robotics system that learns from human implicit communication. This research aims to enhance the natural communication abilities of robots and facilitate their Integration into daily collaborative activities.

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is an interdisciplinary field that utilises both quantitative and qualitative methods. While ROSBags, a file format within the Robot Operating System (ROS), offer an efficient means of collecting temporally synched multimodal data in empirical studies with real robots, there is a lack of tools specifically designed to integrate qualitative coding and analysis functions with ROSBags. To address this gap, we developed ROSAnnotator, a web-based application that incorporates a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) to support both manual and automated annotation of ROSBag data. ROSAnnotator currently facilitates video, audio, and transcription annotations and provides an open interface for custom ROS messages and tools. By using ROSAnnotator, researchers can streamline the qualitative analysis process, create a more cohesive analysis pipeline, and quickly access statistical summaries of annotations, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of HRI data analysis. https://github.com/CHRI-Lab/ROSAnnotator

Trajectory representation learning plays a pivotal role in supporting various downstream tasks, such as travel time estimation, trajectory classification and Top-k similar trajectory search. Traditional methods in order to filter the noise in GPS trajectories tend to focus on routing-based methods to simplify the trajectories. However, these approaches ignore the motion details contained in the GPS data, limiting the representation capability of trajectory representation learning. To fill this gap, we propose a novel representation learning framework that is Jointly G PS and Route Modeling based on self-supervised technology, namely JGRM. We consider GPS trajectory and route trajectory as the two modals of a single movement observation and fuse information through inter-modal information interaction. Specifically, we develop two encoders, each tailored to capture representations of GPS trajectories and route trajectories respectively. The representations from these two modalities are fed into a shared transformer for inter-modal information interaction. Eventually, we design three self-supervised tasks to train the model. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on two real-world datasets through extensive experiments. The experimental results show that JGRM significantly outperforms existing methods in both road segment representation and trajectory representation tasks. Our source code is available at Github https://github.com/mamazi0131/JGRM.

Guiding robots, in the form of canes or cars, have recently been explored to assist blind and low vision (BLV) people. Such robots can provide full or partial autonomy when guiding. However, the pros and cons of different forms and autonomy for guiding robots remain unknown. We sought to fill this gap. We designed autonomy-switchable guiding robotic cane and car. We conducted a controlled lab-study (N=12) and a field study (N=9) on BLV. Results showed that full autonomy received better walking performance and subjective ratings in the controlled study, whereas participants used more partial autonomy in the natural environment as demanding more control. Besides, the car robot has demonstrated abilities to provide a higher sense of safety and navigation efficiency compared with the cane robot. Our findings offered empirical evidence about how the BLV community perceived different machine forms and autonomy, which can inform the design of assistive robots.

As autonomous driving systems prevail, it is becoming increasingly critical that the systems learn from databases containing fine-grained driving scenarios. Most databases currently available are human-annotated; they are expensive, time-consuming, and subject to behavioral biases. In this paper, we provide initial evidence supporting a novel technique utilizing drivers' electroencephalography (EEG) signals to implicitly label hazardous driving scenarios while passively viewing recordings of real-road driving, thus sparing the need for manual annotation and avoiding human annotators' behavioral biases during explicit report. We conducted an EEG experiment using real-life and animated recordings of driving scenarios and asked participants to report danger explicitly whenever necessary. Behavioral results showed the participants tended to report danger only when overt hazards (e.g., a vehicle or a pedestrian appearing unexpectedly from behind an occlusion) were in view. By contrast, their EEG signals were enhanced at the sight of both an overt hazard and a covert hazard (e.g., an occlusion signalling possible appearance of a vehicle or a pedestrian from behind). Thus, EEG signals were more sensitive to driving hazards than explicit reports. Further, the Time-Series AI (TSAI, [1]) successfully classified EEG signals corresponding to overt and covert hazards. We discuss future steps necessary to materialize the technique in real life.

Quadruped robots have the potential to guide blind and low vision (BLV) people due to their highly flexible locomotion and emotional value provided by their bionic forms. However, the development of quadruped guide robots rarely involves BLV users' participatory designs and evaluations. In this paper, we conducted two empirical experiments both in indoor controlled and outdoor field scenarios, exploring the benefits and drawbacks of quadruped guide robots. The results show that the nowadays commercial quadruped robots exposed significant disadvantages in usability and trust compared with wheeled robots. It is concluded that the moving gait and walking noise of quadruped robots would limit the guiding effectiveness to a certain extent, and the empathetic effect of its bionic form for BLV users could not be fully reflected. Based on the findings of wheeled robots and quadruped robots' advantages, we discuss the design implications for the future guide robot design for BLV users. This paper reports the first empirical experiment about quadruped guide robots with BLV users and preliminary explores their potential improvement space in substituting guide dogs, which can inspire the further specialized design of quadruped guide robots.