Guest Editor:
Leimin Tian, Monash University, Australia
Power of social influences increases due to the number of others. Social influences in interaction with more than one person have been broadly investigated in human science literature. Recent studies reported that such social influences are happening in the human-robot interaction with multiple robots in the context of decision-making and behavior changes. This knowledge is not limited to the academic context; due to the popularization of social robots in our society, using multiple robots is becoming common to provide various services in daily environments.
The interaction design with multiple robots would contribute to realizing more natural and understandable interaction with people. For example, a well-designed conversation in information-providing services between robots can cover speech recognition failures and easily avoid conversation breakdown compared to one robot conversation. Moreover, using multiple robots in the education context would contribute to encouraging people’s motivation via social rewards. However, using multiple robots has not only advantages but also a risk of changing people’s opinions incorrectly. For example, people’s views have been influenced by the interaction with multiple robots, particularly interaction between children and multiple robots should be carefully designed. Therefore, understanding the positive and negative effects of using multiple robots would be essential to realize safe and trustworthy human-robot interactions.
This special issue covers a wide range of topics related to social interaction with more than one robot, involving systems, theories, methodologies, technologies, and empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, interaction-based robot design, and other topics related to human-robot interaction with more than one robot are welcome to be submitted. There is no upper limit to the number of robots, but at least two must be involved in an interaction. The topics of the special issue include, but are not limited to:
- Conversational interaction design for multiple robots
- Robots that support human collaboration
- Novel interfaces to control multiple robots that interact with people
- Long-term experience and longitudinal HRI studies with multiple robots
- Social, ethical and aesthetic issues in human-robot interaction research
- Robots in education, therapy, and rehabilitation
- Multiple robot companions and social robots in home environments
- Applications of social robots in entertainment, service robotics, and others
- Non-verbal cues and expressiveness between multiple robots
- Social presence for multiple robots
- Personalities for multiple robotic characters
- Perception and recognition functions for multiple robots
- Multimodal interaction and conversational skills for group conversations
- Cooperation and collaboration in human-robot teams
- Motion planning and navigation for multiple robots
- Computational architectures for interaction with multiple robots
- Child-robots interaction
- Creating Relationships with multiple robots
- Embodiment, empathy and intersubjectivity in interaction with robotic characters
