MOTIVATION AND SCOPE
In order to make Human-Robot interactive communication socially acceptable, legible, and natural from the user’s point of view, it is of paramount importance to endow a robot with the ability to model the users’ preferences, needs, and motivations. Creating robotic systems capable of correctly recognizing, and consequently, modelling the human behavior and preferences is a very critical and challenging task, especially in the domain of assistive and social robotics and when working with vulnerable user populations. A robot should be able to cope with local uncertainties of the environment, variations of the human desires and motivations, and volatilities of the interaction itself. The embodiment condition of a robot requires the abilities to extract such relevant information from the interaction history but also from the indirect observation of the user. Thus, a user modeling component should cope with these challenging and evolving requirements. With respect to software agents, the embodiment condition requires also to consider the physical characteristics of the interaction, such as the user preferences regarding robot’s physical movements in the space (e.g., proxemics, speed, and trajectories).

A personalized and adaptive interaction, differently from pure reactive strategies, strongly relies on the learning of such computational model of human behavior and on the integration of these into the decision-making algorithms of the robot. This includes also the possibility of endowing the robot with meta-cognition capabilities such as the capability of reasoning on the other individuals’ intentions, desires, and beliefs, as well as their internal states, personality, and emotions (often referred to as Theory of Mind - ToM). The ability of a robot to adapt its behavior according to social expectations, specific cultural norms, and possible individual preferences, will determine the success and large-scale use of such robotics application.

This Special Issue aims at examining and promoting recent developments in the Personalized and Adaptive interactive communication in robotics, so providing to the UMUAI journal with a different perspective related to the specific characteristics of the interaction with a physical robot. The submitted papers will undergo peer review process before they can be accepted. Notification of acceptance will be communicated as we progress with the review process.

LIST OF TOPICS