Social robots have great potential in supporting individuals’ physical and mental health/wellbeing. While they have been increasingly evaluated in some domains, such as with children with autism, their evaluation has not been as extensive in other areas. We present a systematic review of domains in which social robots have been evaluated specifically in health/wellbeing contexts. We ask which robots have been evaluated, who the participants were, and how participants interacted with the robots. PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews were followed. Articles with children as participants, using a purely robotic device, and in languages other than English were excluded. A total of 9,362 peer-reviewed articles (up to February 2021) from ACM DL, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, PubMed, and PsychInfo were identified. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria 443 articles were included in the review. The majority of studies were conducted at care centers while studies in hospitals/clinics have seen relatively limited attention. In many cases, the social robots were not programmed for specific health-related tasks, limiting their application. We also discuss robots used in real-world settings and propose a “Personal healthcare journey,” which includes different stages of one’s life which could benefit from a social robot, with the goal of increasing long-term adoption of social robots for supporting health/wellbeing.

Does the norm of first-come-first-serve (FCFS) equally apply to those piloting a Mobile Remote Presence (MRP) system as to those who are physically present with it? While telepresence robots could make social interactions more accessible and enjoyable for geographically-constrained individuals, such an outcome requires both pilots and local users of MRPs to share the same social norm expectations that govern their use. To address this question, we conducted an online study$(N=903)$involving simulated human-MRP interaction scenarios. Our results suggest that those remotely piloting the MRP-rather than local users-assign the robot to a lower social priority; they find it more appropriate when local users ignore queue order than when pilots ignore queue order. Furthermore, we provide significant empirical evidence that local users expect different social norms to be upheld depending on how they perceive the robot. Those who perceive MRPs simply as robots-rather than an extension of a person-do not expect the FCFS norm to be respected for MRPs.

One of the fundamental modes of learning in children is through curiosity. Children (and adults) interact with new people, learn about novel objects, activities and other stimuli through curiosity and other intrinsic motivations. Creating autonomous robots that learn continually through intrinsic curiosity may result in breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Such robots could continue to learn about themselves and the world around them through curiosity, thus improving their abilities over their ‘lifetime’. Although recent works on curiosity in different fields have produced significant results, most of these works have focused on constrained simulated environments which do not involve human interaction. However, in real-world applications such as healthcare, home-assistance etc., robots generally have to interact with humans on a regular basis. In these scenarios, it is imperative that curiosity is directed towards seeking out and learning important information from the humans when needed rather than simply learning in an unsupervised manner. Further, there is limited work on how humans perceive such curious robots and whether humans prefer curious robots that adapt over time to other robots that simply perform their assigned tasks. In this workshop, our goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners in different multidisciplinary fields to discuss the role of robot curiosity in real-world applications and its implications in human-robot interaction (HRI).

How do we make concrete progress towards de-signing robots that can navigate ethically sensitive contexts? Almost two decades after the word ‘roboethics’ was coined, translating interdisciplinary roboethics discussions into techni-cal design still remains a daunting task. This paper describes our first attempt at addressing these challenges through a roboethics-themed design competition. The design competition setting allowed us to (a) formulate ethical considerations as an engineering design task that anyone with basic programming skills can tackle; and (b) develop a prototype evaluation scheme that incorporates diverse normative perspectives of multiple stakeholders. The initial implementation of the competition was held online at the RO-MAN 2021 conference. The competition task involved programming a simulated mobile robot (TIAGo) that delivers items for individuals in the home environment, where many of these tasks involve ethically sensitive con-texts (e.g., an underage family member asks for an alcoholic drink). This paper outlines our experiences implementing the competition and the lessons we learned. We highlight design competitions as a promising mechanism to enable a new wave of roboethics research equipped with technical design solutions.

Understanding human navigational intent is essential for robots to be able to interact with and navigate around humans safely and naturally. Current methods typically perform inference through only one mode of perception such as human motion trajectory, and a single theoretical framework such as a learning-based or classical approach. In contrast, this paper studies prediction of human navigational intent using multimodal perception within a hybrid framework. Our framework consists of two modules: a) a learning-based prediction module to predict a human’s future goal position, and b) a classical control theory-inspired reconstruction module to reconstruct a possible future trajectory or a set of possible future positions using the predicted future goal position. For the prediction module, we propose an end-to-end LSTM-CNN hybrid neural network for predicting a human’s future position in the real world, given human motion, human body pose and head orientation. This visual information from an egocentric perspective is used to make predictions of a human’s future position in world space, essential for robotic navigation algorithms and planning. In the reconstruction module, we present two control theoretic methods to reconstruct possible future trajectories of human: trajectory generation for differentially flat system and reachability analysis. We evaluate the performance of our framework on a newly collected dataset called SFU-Store-Nav. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms various baselines especially when a relatively small amount of data is available.

Positive emotions play a fundamental role in promoting well-being, social bonding, and encouraging people to flourish. We investigated an affective robot's potential to promote positive moods in human groups during a collaborative task. A between-subject experiment (N=39 teams, 78 participants) was conducted to compare the improvement in participants' mood and robot's impression after conducting a collaborative task with an affective robot showing either positive or neutral behaviors. We found that self-reported valence and arousal increased in human participants when interacting with the affective robot regardless of the robot's perceived mood. Additionally, we discovered that participants' likeability of the robot increased when interacting with a positive robot, while likeability decreased when interacting with a neutral robot. These results suggest that even if the evidence for emotional contagion between an affective robot and human group members is not conclusive, participants felt more positive after interacting with robots showing affective behaviors in human-robot team interactions.