Our workshop will be held on Tuesday July 13th via Zoom (link). See Program page for details.
The social robot navigation community has reached a crucial point. Despite the large volume of publications, we lack a “common language.” Broadly speaking, we have yet to reach consensus about:
- The most meaningful skills, capabilities, and behaviors that a social navigation system should have.
- Validation standards. Practitioners adopt different scenarios, experimental setups, robot platforms, baselines, and metrics.
- The abstractions best suited for the challenges of social navigation.
- What constitutes a good social navigation dataset. Relatedly, it is unclear how to best use a given dataset (e.g., for training or validation).
Finally, social robot navigation and prediction evaluation studies often lack the statistical rigor seen in other research communities (e.g., experimental psychology).
Motivated by these observations, we would like to call a diverse, multidisciplinary audience to participate in an interactive, discussion-oriented workshop. We would like to hear from roboticists, social scientists, and designers about how to develop best practices for social robot navigation research.
The workshop will be organized around focus topics, which are more narrow “common language” challenges. After our invited speakers briefly present their perspectives upon a focus topic, workshop participants will break off into small, interdisciplinary brainstorming workgroups. These workgroups will be comprised of the invited speakers, the organizers, and the workshop attendees. Ultimately, we want the community to drive the conversation around the focus topics.
