Special issue on robot and human interactive communication

We are pleased to announce the second double-issue on robot and human interactive communication. This special issue is organized to celebrate the 2018 promotion of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) to become an IEEE international conference, and to further encourage researchers in this field to promote interdisciplinary research related to fundamental issues of co-existence of human and intelligent machines. Due to a large amount of submissions, this special issue has been divided into two double-issues. The first double-issue was published in April 2019 as vol. 33(7–8). This second double-issue consists of nine articles including two survey papers.

Both double-issues include the cutting-edge research topics in human-robot interaction (HRI) from elemental functions to applications such as assistive robotics, tele-operation, drones, acoustic signal processing, AI technology and so on. This double-issue includes mainly three novel trends; verbal and non-verbal HRI, physical HRI, and human-robot cooperation to accomplish shared tasks.

While the non-verbal interaction is and continues to be an active area of research, the new developments of AI open the possibility to bring to the new level the developments of verbal HRI. Taniguchi et al. overviewed the old and new developments in language-based HRI by focusing on robot’ language understanding and acquisition in the real world as one of the pioneer research groups in this research area. Liu et al. make bridge between the verbal and non-verbal HRI by proposing a probabilistic nodding behavior generation model based on utterance categories estimated from user’s speeches to make human-robot interaction more natural. Sono et al. developed a chatting physical robot that utilizes deep learning approaches to engage the human walking partner in conversations about currently experienced sceneries and landscapes. In these two articles, the authors also evaluated their proposed methods with actual robots and showed their effectiveness through experiments. Shiomi and Hagita provided novel findings on the topic of whether a robot can influence people by making a new experiment on conformity effect in HRI.

Several articles dealt with important aspects of physical HRI. Hentout et al. provided an extensive survey for industrial collaborative robots for a decade, which also includes the classification of collaborative tasks and challenges to be explored in the future. Koganti et al. tackled a robotic clothing assistance task based on a non-parametric Bayesian model using a dual-arm robot. Van Toan and Bui Khoi proposed a fuzzy-based-admittance controller that eliminates the identification of inertia and damping matrices for safe and natural human-robot interaction.

Another emerging trend is cooperation between humans and robots for accomplishing common tasks. Prasanga et al. proposed a haptic-based biped locomotion method that achieves real-time biped walking without expensive computation just by sending haptic data using an exoskeleton robot. Filippeschi et al. evaluated a tele-diagnosis system with haptic feedback and 2D/3D visualization for medical examinations using ultrasonography.

We would like to thank all authors who submitted their original papers to both the first and the second double issues. We also would like to thank every reviewer who gave valuable and insightful comments all the way to improve the quality of each paper. Finally, we would like to show our appreciation to Ms. Noriko Watanabe of Advanced Robotics, for her great assistance.