Connectionists: [journals] CFP: Special issue on Robotic Co-worker: Psychological and Cognitive Safety in Human-Robot Interactive Social Environments

[Ngo Trung Dung]

Dear Colleagues,

A gentle reminder about the special issue on

*Robotic Co-workers: Psychological and Cognitive Safety in Human-robot
Interactive Social Environments*

*IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Development Systems*
**Aim and Scope**

In the vision of a cyber-society, humans and robots will closely
collaborate to perform given tasks. Robots will automate mundane tasks and
let humans focus on higher-order jobs requiring more cognitive skills. In
this trend, professional and personal service robots are enabling assistive
technologies in human-robot shared workspaces. However, the first and the
most challenging issue with respect to deploying developmental and
cognitive robots in human populated environments is how to guarantee human
physical and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces. Physical
safety is about how to maintain a minimum physical distance between robots
and humans, which is obviously necessary to deploy autonomous robots in
human populated environments, while cognitive safety implies that robots
should not cause stress and discomfort to humans when working with or
around them. Human risks and their inconveniences when working in an
interactive social environment essentially come from unavoidable situations
due to robot malfunctioning operations caused by either misunderstanding
and misinterpreting information extracted from sensing and perception or
failures of path planning and motion control. Furthermore, humans may feel
uncomfortable as well as fearful and stressful towards collaborative robots
as such robots don’t behave in the natural way of humans with respect to
their social situations, contexts, and cultures. It is important to find
out a methodological approach for incorporating social signals, cues, and
norms into developmental perception, cognitive reasoning and motion
planning of the robot control architecture so that the robot is capable of
securing human psychological and cognitive safety when interacting and
collaborating with humans to perform tasks in human-robot shared workspaces.

**Themes**

The Special Issue aims to address challenges and methodologies of how to
deal with psychological and cognitive safety in order to accelerate
deployment and adoption of developmental and cognitive robots into
human-robot shared workspaces. The ultimate goals of this special issue are
to (1) to address the state-of-the-art research (2) and to generate an
avenue for researchers to disseminate their recent research findings in the
perspective of psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared
workplaces.

This special issue targets on all aspects of guaranteeing psychological and
cognitive safety in human-robot interactive social environments with, but
not limited to, the following topics:


   - *Current state-of-the-art*: future perspective of developmental and
   cognitive robots with concerns of ethics and rules for human psychological
   and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces.
   - *Perception for psychological and cognitive safety*: capacity and
   roles of human face and body detection and tracking, human gestures and
   posture recognition, social cues and signal detection and identification,
   human-object interaction and human group interaction detection and tracking
   in satisfying psychological and cognitive safety.
   - *Cognitive reasoning, motion planning and control*: methodological
   development of human aware robot navigation, collaborative task
   performances in dynamic social environments with concerns of psychological
   and cognitive safety.
   - *Machine learning for developmental and cognitive robots*: using
   learning by demonstration, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and
   hierarchical learning to enhance psychological and cognitive safety in
   human-robot shared workplaces.
   - *Ergonomic studies of developmental and cognitive robots*:
   developmental and cognitive factors and benchmarks, evaluation methods,
   objective and subjective measurement metrics, experiments and validation
   methods for psychological and cognitive safety.
   - *Applications domains*: concerns of psychological and cognitive safety
   when working with developmental and cognitive robots in public places,
   light industry, digital manufacturing, and transformed manufacturing.


**Submission Guideline**

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the “Information for Authors”
of the journal found at
https://cis.ieee.org/publications/t-cognitive-and-developmental-systems/tcds-information-for-authors
and
submissions should be done through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center:
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee and please select the category
“SI: Psychological and Cognitive Safety”.


**Important Dates**

31 December 2019 – Deadline for manuscript submission

15 Apr 2020 – Notification of authors

15 May 2020 – Deadline for revised manuscripts

15 July 2020 – Final version

For further information, please contact one of the following Guest Editors.


**Guest Editors**


*Dr. Trung Dung Ngo,*

University of Prince Edward Island, Canada,

tngo at upei.ca


*Dr. **Rachid Alami* <http://homepages.laas.fr/rachid/>,

LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France

Rachid.Alami at laas.fr


*Dr. **Takayuki Kanda* <http://www.irc.atr.jp/%7Ekanda/>,

Kyoto University, Japan

 kanda at i.kyoto-u.ac.jp


*Dr. **Goldie Nejat* <https://www.mie.utoronto.ca/mie/faculty/nejat>

University of Toronto, Canada

nejat at mie.utoronto.ca


*Dr. **Yongsheng Ou*
<http://sourcedb.cas.cn/sourcedb_siat_cas/yw/zjrc/201103/t20110317_3087300.html>
,

SIAT, Chinese Academy of Science, China

ys.ou at siat.ac.cn

Sincerely,
Trung Ngo
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