Objectives

Recent advancements in both robotics and extended reality (XR) technologies have ushered in a new era, where robots collaborate seamlessly with humans. Ensuring social acceptance of these technologies is crucial for their widespread adoption. Social acceptance is defined as the ability of these technologies to operate comfortably in diverse social settings, like postal offices or rehabilitation centers, while effectively assisting users without causing discomfort.

Our workshop aims to unite experts in robotics and XR technologies from academia and industry to share their latest developments and insights into socially acceptable robotic systems. We’ve identified four key pathways to enhance social acceptance in next-gen systems: user profiling, understanding, interaction, communication, implementation of acceptable behaviors, and characterizing relevant application scenarios.

Discussion will be focused around the following main themes

1. How can responsible innovation principles be implemented in robots and XR systems that can model, profile and understand users?
2. How can socially acceptable interaction and communication systems be developed for robots? How can socially acceptance be evaluated?
3. Where and how can socially acceptable robots and XR systems be implemented? What are the meaningful and ethical industry relevant use cases?

The workshop will be followed by an insight session where we will focus on these themes. Researchers will present contributions related to cutting edge research on the topics discussed in the workshop. In order to foster the interaction, the presentations will be delivered in a “pitch and poster” format. The insight session will allow an interested audience to delve into the theme of the workshops by talking directly with the researchers that are developing it. The contributions of the insight session will be peer-reviewed and all accepted contributions will be indexed. See Call for contributions for further details.

Important dates

Submission deadline for the insight session: 5^th January 2024 (extended)

Notification of paper acceptance: 31^st January 2024

Workshop and insight session date: 14^th March 2024

Endorsed by

The workshop and insight session are organized within the EU Horizon Europe project SERMAS (Socially-acceptable Extended Reality Models And Systems, GA n. 101070351): https://sermasproject.eu/.