[Event at CIG] [meetings] CFP: IEEE RO-MAN 2022 special session on Safe Human-Robot Collaboration

[AndreA Orlandini]

apologies for multiple copies

Call for papers

*Special session: Safe Human-Robot Cooperation and Collaboration in 
manufacturing environments*

31th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive 
Communication (IEEE RO-MAN 2022)
29/8-2/9 2022 Naples, Italy
http://www.smile.unina.it/ro-man2022/

*Submission deadline: 15th of March 2022**
**Special session code: n17r1*


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Motivation and goals
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution (or most commonly termed ‘Industry 
4.0’) comprises the ongoing insurrectionary transition of conventional 
manufacturing/industrial pipelines towards significantly more 
automatized and data-driven ones, making extensive use of emerging and 
advanced technologies, like the Internet of things (IoT), Big Data 
analytics, smart sensors, advanced human-machine interfaces, etc. 
Inevitably, robots constitute an integral ingredient of this process, 
since they can boost: a) the increase in the levels of automation, b) 
the tighter connection of the physical and the digital world, c) the 
shifting from a central control system to a smart decentralized one, d) 
the implementation of closed-loop data models and control systems, and 
e) the personalization/customization of products and processes. This in 
turn raises the need for more efficient and effective human-robot 
cooperative (humans and robots work alternately on different tasks 
within a process in the same workspace) and collaborative (humans and 
robots interact in a shared workspace, e.g. working on the same 
workpiece) schemes. Indeed, humans and robots already work together in 
production nowadays (with distinct roles and usually in an isolated way 
though), where robots are reliably shown to support and relieve human 
operators, to enable versatile automation steps and to increase 
productivity. The purpose of this special session is to explore how 
cooperation and collaboration among humans and robots can work in a safe 
and acceptable way fostering their integration in real contexts. The 
special session will focus on any application area with a specific 
attention to industrial scenarios, one of the most promising application 
areas for collaborative robots (or cobots). The contribution should 
present solution to robustly address current challenges in manufacturing 
(e.g. to handle fine-grained, customizable, flexible, sophisticated and 
sensitive tasks, to combine human capabilities with the efficiency and 
precision of machines, etc.), to realize safe human-robot interaction, 
collaboration and communication capabilities.

This special session focuses on critical challenges for cobots that 
remain to be addressed in order to enable their effective and 
sustainable deployment in real-world operational settings, including, 
among others, the following main aspects: a) Safe interaction, including 
safety standards and collaborative operating modes, respecting and 
predicting the human co-worker’s space, b) Intuitive interfaces, 
including programming approaches, input modes and reality enhancement, 
and c) Design methods, including task planning and allocation, control 
laws and sensors. Addressing the latter constitutes a prerequisite for 
reaching successful Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) schemes, which will 
in turn provide a promising way to achieve increases in productivity 
while decreasing production costs, based on the combination of the human 
ability to judge, react and plan with the repeatability and strength of 
a robot.


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Expected contributions
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Papers to be presented in the special session cover topics related, but 
not limited, to:
- Large-scale multi-agent human-robot collaborative learning
- Learning from (human) demonstration
- Advanced AI technologies in HRC
- Deployment of robotic systems in manufacturing environments
- Safety issues in HRC
- Collaborative task assignment and planning in HRC
- New functions for enriching Robotics Standards
- Human detection, tracking and proximity sensing in HRC
- Human-aware Task and Motion planning in realistic environments
- Human activity modeling and prediction in HRC
- Communication and coordination between human and robot
- Tactile sensing and physical human robot interaction
- Multi-modal interaction/interfaces in HRC
- Failure detection and recovery in HRC control systems
- Human factors analysis in HRC
- Trust in HRC schemes
- Evaluation methods for HRC workplaces and process (productivity, 
flexibility etc.)
- Cognitive architectures for human-robot collaboration and learning
- Ergonomics of HRC (Physical, Intensity of signals, alarms, visual 
field etc.)
- Semantic mapping in HRC environments
- Benchmarking and evaluating performance for HRC


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Paper format and submission guidelines
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http://www.smile.unina.it/ro-man2022/call-for-papers/


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Important dates
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Paper submission deadline:   March 15, 2022
Notification of Acceptance:    May 30, 2022
Camera-ready Submission:    June 15, 2022


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Organizers
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Dr.-Ing. Mohamad Bdiwi, Fraunhofer Institute for machine tools and 
forming technology, Chemnitz, Germany
Mr. Marco Faroni, Institute of Intelligent Industrial Technologies and 
Systems for Advanced Manufacturing (STIIMA-CNR), Milan, Italy
Dr. AndreA Orlandini, Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology 
(CNR-ISTC), Rome, Italy
Dr. Georgios Th. Papadopoulos, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation 
for Research and Technology - Hellas (ICS-FORTH), Greece
Dr. Dirk Wollherr, Technical University of Munich, Germany
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AndreA Orlandini PhD

  National Research Council of Italy
  Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology
  Phone:  +39-06-44595-223      E-mail:andrea.orlandini at istc.cnr.it
  Fax:    +39-06-44595-243      Url:http://www.istc.cnr.it/group/pst
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