Upcoming issues:

ERCIM News No. 114 (July 2018)

DEADLINE FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Monday, 28 May

Please read the guidelines below before submitting an article

The sections of ERCIM News 114 are :

• Joint ERCIM Actions
• Special Theme: "Human-Robot Interaction"
  
• Research and Innovation
• Events
• In Brief

The Special Theme and the Research and Innovation sections contain articles presenting a panorama of European research activities. The Special Theme focuses on a sector which has been selected by the editors from a short list of currently "hot" topics whereas the Research and Innovation section contains articles describing scientific activities, research results, and technical transfer endeavours in any sector of Information and Communication Science and Technology (ICST), telecommunications or applied mathematics. Submissions to the Special Theme section are subjected to an external review process coordinated by invited guest editors whereas submissions to the Research and Innovation section are checked and approved by the ERCIM News editorial board.

Special Theme: "Human-Robot Interaction"

• Serena Ivaldi (Inria)
• Maria Pateraki (ICS-FORTH)

In the last years there has been a proliferation of applications for robots interacting physically with humans, in manufacturing and
industry, from bimanual cooperation in assembly with cobots (i.e., industrial manipulators for collaboration) to physical assistance with
exoskeletons. These applications have driven research in many fundamental topics for collaboration, such as shared task allocation,
synchronization and coordination, control of contacts and physical interaction, role estimation and adaptive role allocation during
collaboration, learning by demonstrations, safe control, etc. All the advances in the state of the art in these topics contribute to the
success of the “so called” Industry 4.0, whose elite platforms are essentially cobots and exoskeletons.

At the same time, research in social robotics has made numerous progress in understanding the behaviour and the intricacy of verbal
and non-verbal signals exchanged by robots and humans during interaction, shading light on critical aspects such as trust, mutual
awareness and turn-taking. These studies were initially motivated by the increased assistance and service robotics application, ranging from the
introduction of robots in malls and shops to hospitals and homes, but are now becoming crucial for the acceptance of new intelligent robotics
technologies in other industrial domains such as in manufacturing. The HRI research community is thus advancing on both physical and social
interaction skills for robots. The proof of the convergence of both skills are the new industrial robots such as Baxter or Sawyer, where
compliant arms such as in cobots where coupled with a face emulating referential gaze and social behaviour, to facilitate the collaboration
with humans.

This special issue aims at drawing the state-of-the-art of human-robot interaction, discussing the current challenges that the research
community faces for integrating both physical and social interaction skills in the future collaborative robots.

Topics include and are not limited to:

• Safe control of physical interaction
• Control of physical interaction with humans
• Human-in-the-loop control
• Human movement and dynamics estimation
• Anticipation and prediction
• Human augmentation
• Shared control, coordination, cooperation
• Multi-modal interaction, multi-party interaction
• Wearable sensors
• Collaboration
• Social robotics
• Verbal and non-verbal communication
• Human studies
• Trust
• Ethical issues.

All articles have to be sent to the local editor for your country (see About ERCIM News) or to the central editor This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Reviewing:
Articles submitted to the special theme and the research and society sections are subject to a review process.

Guidelines for ERCIM News articles

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Publishing in ERCIM News offers several advantages:

• ERCIM News represents an excellent opportunity to present your research to a broad audience, also outside your own research community
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• Articles of the sections "Special Theme" and "Research and Innovation" are referenced by DBLP and by Web of Science (from issue 104 onwards)