CFP – Special Issue: “Representations and Reasoning for Robotics”

Call for Papers

Special Issue of Robotics on “Representations and Reasoning for Robotics”

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/robotics/special_issues/reasoning-robotics

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2015
As the field of robotics matures, the development of ever more intelligent robots becomes possible. However, robots deployed in homes, offices and other complex domains are faced with the formidable challenge of representing, revising and reasoning with incomplete domain knowledge about their capabilities, their environments, and how the former interacts with the latter.

Many algorithms have been developed for qualitatively and quantitatively representing and reasoning with knowledge and uncertainty. Unfortunately, research contributions in this area are fragmented, making it difficult for researchers with different expertise to share advances in their respective fields. The objective of this special issue is therefore to promote a deeper understanding of recent breakthroughs and challenges in knowledge representation and reasoning for robots. We are interested in efforts that integrate, or motivate an integration of algorithms for knowledge representation and/or commonsense reasoning, on one or more robots, in different application domains.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

– Knowledge acquisition and representation
– Symbolic and probabilistic representations
– Reasoning with incomplete knowledge
– Interactive and cooperative decision-making
– Learning and symbol grounding
– Qualitative representations and reasoning

We particularly encourage the submission of papers that ground these topics in research areas such as robot perception, human–robot (and multirobot) collaboration, and robot planning.
Guest Editors

Dr. Nicola Bellotto
(University of Lincoln, UK)

Dr. Nick Hawes
(University of Birmingham, UK)

Dr. Mohan Sridharan
(The University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Prof. Daniele Nardi
(“Sapienza” Universita’ di Roma, Italy)
Submission

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Robotics is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Paper on Facial Analysis for HRI accepted for ICRA 2013

Our joint paper with the CoR-Lab in Bielefeld has been accepted at ICRA 2013. Kudos go to Christian Lang for his excellent work.

Facial Communicative Signal Interpretation in Human-Robot Interaction by Discriminative Video Subsequence Selection

Facial communicative signals (FCSs) such as head gestures, eye gaze, and facial expressions can provide useful feedback in conversations between people and also in humanrobot interaction. This paper presents a pattern recognition approach for the interpretation of FCSs in terms of valence, based on the selection of discriminative subsequences in video data. These subsequences capture important temporal dynamics and are used as prototypical reference subsequences in a classification procedure based on dynamic time warping and feature extraction with active appearance models. Using this valence classification, the robot can discriminate positive from negative interaction situations and react accordingly. The approach is evaluated on a database containing videos of people interacting with a robot by teaching the names of several objects to it. The verbal answer of the robot is expected to elicit the display of spontaneous FCSs by the human tutor, which were classified in this work. The achieved classification accuracies are comparable to the average human recognition performance and outperformed our previous results on this task.

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