Tag: Social Robots

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The ICSR 2025 Website is Now Online

The ICSR is one of the leading conferences for social robotics worldwide. The 17th edition will take place from 10 to 12 September 2025 in Naples, Italy. The conference website is now online: icsr2025.eu. “The conference theme, ‘Emotivation at the Core: Empowering Social Robots to Inspire and Connect,’ highlights the essential role of ‘Emotivation’ in social robotics. Emotivation captures the synergy between emotion and motivation, where emotions trigger and sustain motivation during interactions. In social robotics, this concept is key to building trust, fostering empathy, and supporting decision-making by enabling robots to respond sensitively to human emotions, inspiring engagement and action.” (Website ICSR) The most important conferences dates are: Full Paper Submission: March 28th, 2025; Full Paper Notification: May 9th, 2025; Camera-ready: June 30th, 2025; Paper Presentation Days at ICSR’25: September 11th and 12th, 2025. All dates are also listed on the website. Participants will meet for two days at the Parthenope University of Naples and for the third day at the Città della Scienza conference center. All buildings and rooms are also listed on the website. Be part of this excellent conference (Photo: ICSR)!

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Social Robots in Olten

The elective module “Social Robots” by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel took place from November 4 to 6, 2024 at the Olten Campus. Tamara Siegmann (with the online presentation of the paper “Social and Collaborative Robots in Prison”) was invited as a guest speaker. She made it clear to those present that every member of the university can make a contribution to research. On site were Pepper and NAO from the FHNW Robo Labs as well as Unitree Go2, Alpha Mini, Cozmo, Furby, and Booboo (aka Boo Boo) from Oliver Bendel’s privately funded Social Robots Lab. Unitree Go2 – also called Bao (Chinese for “treasure, darling”) by the lecturer – and Booboo were particularly well received. At the end of the elective module, the students designed social robots – also with the help of generative AI – that they found useful, meaningful or simply attractive. The elective modules have been offered since 2021 and are very popular.

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The Uncanny Social Robot

The uncanny valley effect is a famous hypothesis. Whether it can be influenced by context is still unclear. In an online experiment, Katharina Kühne and her co-authors Oliver Bendel, Yuefang Zue, and Martin Fischer found a negative linear relationship between a robot’s human likeness and its likeability and trustworthiness, and a positive linear relationship between a robot’s human likeness and its uncaniness. “Social context priming improved overall likability and trust of robots but did not modulate the Uncanny Valley effect.” (Abstract) Katharina Kühne outlined these conclusions in her presentation “Social, but Still Uncanny” – the title of the paper – at the International Conference on Social Robotics 2024 in Odense, Denmark. Like Yuefang Zue and Martin Fischer, she is a researcher at the University of Potsdam. Oliver Bendel teaches and researches at the FHNW School of Business. Together with Tamara Siegmann, he presented a second paper at the ICSR.

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Robots in Prison

On October 22, 2024, Tamara Siegmann and Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel (School of Business FHNW) presented their project “Robots in Prison” at the ICSR in Odense (Denmark). They investigated whether collaborative and social robots can and should be used in prisons. One result was that modern industrial robots such as cobots and classic service robots such as transportation and cleaning robots hardly create any added value. Instead, they take work away from inmates. In contrast, social robots are conceivable and useful. They bring something to imprisonment that is common in freedom. And – an important point for resocialization – they can combat the loneliness of inmates. The International Conference on Social Robotics is the most important conference for social robotics alongside Robophilosophy. The paper “Social and Collaborative Robots in Prison” will be published in a proceedings volume by Springer at the end of the year.

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Can and Should We Use Robots in Prisons?

Tamara Siegmann and Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel carried out the “Robots in Prison” project in June and July 2024. The student, who is studying business administration at the FHNW School of Business, came up with the idea after taking an elective module on social robots with Oliver Bendel. In his paper “Love Dolls and Sex Robots in Unproven and Unexplored Fields of Application”, the philosopher of technology had already made a connection between robots and prisons, but had not systematically investigated this. They did this together with the help of expert interviews with the intercantonal commissioner for digitalization, several prison directors and employees as well as inmates. The result was the paper “Social and Collaborative Robots in Prison”, which was submitted to the ICSR 2024. The International Conference on Social Robotics is the most important conference for social robotics alongside Robophilosophy. The paper was accepted in September 2024 after a revision of the methods section, which was made more transparent and extensive and linked to a directory on GitHub. This year’s conference will take place in Odense (Denmark) from October 23 to 26. Last year it was held in Doha (Qatar) and the year before last in Florence (Italy).

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Keynote by Anthony Elliott

On the second day of Robophilosophy 2024, Anthony Elliott, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia, gave a keynote speech entitled “May AI Be With You: Agency and Automation in the Age of Algorithmic Modernity”. From the abstract: “From industrial robots to ChatGPT, and from driverless cars to military drones: AI is transforming all aspects of our lives, from the changing nature of work, employment and unemployment to the most intimate aspects of personal relationships. In this presentation, Anthony Elliott focuses on the complex systems of AI – spanning intelligent machines, chatbots, advanced robotics, accelerating automation, big data – and their centrality to new forms of social interaction, organizational life and governance. He argues, provocatively, that today modernity has come to mean smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, big data, automated recommendation systems and predictive analytics. This has heralded the arrival of what he terms ‘algorithmic modernity’, an altogether new ‘stage’ in the ordering techniques of envisioned human mastery. In this automated order of algorithmic modernity, human agency is increasingly outsourced to smart machines. We should understand this phenomenon, Elliott argues, in terms of a containment of both uncertainty and complexity which the digital revolution in social relations poses, but which ultimately denies answers.” (Website Robophilosophy 2024) In his presentation, the sociologist emphasised the risks of AI rather than the opportunities. The photo shows David Gunkel announcing Anthony Elliott’s lecture – he is sitting on the far left.

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Robots at Arm’s Length

The paper “Robots at arm’s length: Unveiling the dynamics of interpersonal distance preferences in human-robot interactions” by Katharina Kühne, Laura M. Zimmer, Melina Jeglinski-Mende, Oliver Bendel, Yuefang Zhou, and Martin Fischer was accepted at Robophilosophy 2024. The study focuses on the spatial distance between social robots and humans. According to the authors, the results have implications for the design of social robots and the optimization of interactions, especially in educational or medical contexts. Katharina Kühne is a PhD student in the Potsdam Embodied Cognition Group (PECoG) at the University of Potsdam. She has a diploma in language teaching, a master’s degree in linguistics, and a master’s degree in cognitive psychology. She is supervised by Prof. Dr. Martin Fischer (University of Potsdam, head of the PECoG) and Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel (FHNW School of Business, associated researcher of the PECoG). The results of the study will be presented at Robophilosophy, which will take place in Aarhus from August 20 to 23, 2024.

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The ICSR 2024 is Approaching

The deadline for the International Conference on Social Robotics 2024 (ICSR 2024) is approaching. Experts in social robotics and related fields have until July 5 to submit their papers. The prestigious event was last held in Florence (2022) and Qatar (2023). Now it enters its next round. The 16th edition will bring together researchers and practitioners working on human-robot interaction and the integration of social robots into our society. The title of the conference includes the addition “AI”. This is a clarification and demarcation that has to do with the fact that there will be two further formats with the name ICSR in 2024. ICSR’24 (ICSR + AI) will take place as a face-to-face conference in Odense, Denmark, from 23 to 26 October 2024. The theme of this year’s conference is “Empowering Humanity: The role of social and collaborative robotics in shaping our future”. The topics of the Call for Papers include “collaborative robots in service applications (in construction, agriculture, etc.)”, “Human-robot interaction and collaboration”, “Affective and cognitive sciences for socially interactive robots”, and “Context awareness, expectation, and intention understanding”. The general chairs are Oskar Palinko, University of Southern Denmark, and Leon Bodenhagen, University of Southern Denmark. More information is available at icsr2024.dk.

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UFSKW Paper-of-the-Month Award

The article “‘Ick bin een Berlina’: dialect proficiency impacts a robot’s trustworthiness and competence evaluation” by Katharina Kühne, Erika Herbold, Oliver Bendel, Yuefang Zhou, and Martin H. Fischer has been granted the UFSKW Paper-of-the-Month Award for March 2024. All authors are researchers in the Potsdam Embodied Cognition Group (PECoG) at the University of Potsdam, with the exception of Oliver Bendel, who works at the FHNW School of Business and is an associated researcher in the group. “UFSKW” stands for “Universitärer Forschungsschwerpunkt Kognitionswissenschaften”. It is based at the University of Potsdam. The UFSKW Paper of the Month provides a special stage for current cognitive science research at the UFSKW. It is chosen monthly by the selection committee from all submissions. The paper says about the background of the project: “Robots are increasingly used as interaction partners with humans. Social robots are designed to follow expected behavioral norms when engaging with humans and are available with different voices and even accents. Some studies suggest that people prefer robots to speak in the user’s dialect, while others indicate a preference for different dialects.” The following results are mentioned: “We found a positive relationship between participants’ self-reported Berlin dialect proficiency and trustworthiness in the dialect-speaking robot. Only when controlled for demographic factors, there was a positive association between participants’ dialect proficiency, dialect performance and their assessment of robot’s competence for the standard German-speaking robot. Participants’ age, gender, length of residency in Berlin, and device used to respond also influenced assessments. Finally, the robot’s competence positively predicted its trustworthiness.” The article can be accessed at www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2023.1241519/full.

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ICSR 2024 + Competition

The main conference of the ICSR will be held in Odense in 2024, and its full name is “16th International Conference on Social Robotics +AI”. There is also the ICSR-2024 Competition in Naples, Italy. According to the website, it is “The 1st Competition of the International Conference on Social Robotics”. The new format will take place on 8-9 May 2024. The General Chair explains the intention of the event: “ICSR Competition aims at being not only a competition but an extraordinary showcase of innovation and talent in the field of robotics. This event marks the convergence of brilliance, where teams comprising students, PhD students, researchers, and esteemed professors will compete in a series of captivating competitions through a groundbreaking exploration into the realms of robotics, where cutting-edge technologies and social applications come together. In the spirit of fostering collaboration and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, our competitions will showcase the diverse capabilities of robotics.” (Website ICSR-24 Competition) According to the organizers, teams will compete in four different competitions: the Robotic Arm Challenge, the Humanoid Robot Challenge, the Robot Design Challenge, and the Game Jam Challenge. More information is available at www.icsr2024-competition.org.