Welcome to iDR'2012 Workshop

This workshop seeks to provide a forum to explore the latest research in domestic robots, with particular emphasis on robots that are functionally designed to interact and communicate with people. There are a wide range of issues to address to make intelligent domestic robots an everyday reality, covering technical, AI, design and safety. As domestic robots become a greater part of our lives, a new ecology of man and machine may be realised needing insights into the physiological aspects of man and machines working alongside each other. Workshop areas include but are not restricted to:

* Nature-inspired approaches to domestic robots

* All aspects of domestic robot safety, especially with a domestic family environment

* Self-configuration and adaptation of domestic robots / groups of domestic robots

* Information fusion across heterogeneous smart home environments

* All aspects of domestic robot interaction, but particularly with humans, robots and other devices within the ecology of the domestic environment.

* Behavioural paradigms and architectures for domestic robots covering traditional controllers and socially orientated controllers i.e. exploring various psychometric traits such as the irrational, rational, ego centric and so on.

* Emergent service behaviours as a result of co-operative interactions between robots, robots and other devices, robots and people

* Psychological and practical impacts of domestic robots working alongside humans within the domestic environment, adaptations of space and human behaviours, case studies and other experimental evidences.

* All aspects of domestic robot design including aesthetic and architectural issues

This workshop will particularly welcome practical results, description and analysis of user experiments and live or recorded demonstrations of early stage or advanced working prototypes.

Submission details

Authors must submit papers of at least 6, but no more than 12 pages, formatted according to the IOS Press templates available at:

http://www.iospress.nl/authco/instruction_crc.html

Papers should be submitted to the CMT on line system:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/IDR2012/

Key note: Ricardo Téllez

Title: Cognitive Service Robots

Abstract: Current approaches to intelligent service robots follow an idea borrowed from Good-Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI): very complex planning algorithms will produce artificial intelligence. Hence is basically a matter of CPU power to have an operative artificial intelligence for a robot. An example of this believe is the current trend in robotics that uses the cloud as the brain of the robots. It is assumed that the cloud will have CPU power enough to handle object recognition, speech recognition, or grasping. However, current experiments in speech recognition indicate that despite the increase in CPU power along the last years, the speech recognition rate has reached a plateau (not good enough for a real life system).
I will argue that this brute force approach is preventing us from attacking the hard problem of artificial intelligence, that is, make a robot understand. Cloud robotics will not lead to the kind of intelligent robots we need for a human environment. Instead, the solution goes by having robots that are more cognitive (whatever it means), being understanding the main cognitive ability they need. I will define (or not!) what a cognitive robot is, and why this type of cognition is required for robots that have to live on a dynamic human environment.

Speakers Profile: Ricardo Téllez, holds a PhD on Artificial Intelligence by the Technical University of Catalonia. His thesis was devoted to the control of complex robots using neural networks, and how those robots can create their own concepts about the world.

He has been working for more than five years at company Pal Robotics developing service robots. He developed the navigation systems of human size humanoid robot Reem-B, making it the first human size humanoid robot able to move autonomously. At present, he develops better navigation systems for humanoid robots in crowded environments, allowing them to move safely for both the robot and people.
He is specially interested on the development of service robots that can really understand their environment.