Special Issue: Call for Papers

We strongly encourage submissions of an extended version of your workshop contribution or other topical work to the special issue on The Road to Successful HRI: Trust, Acceptance, Ethics, Social Signals and AI in the International Journal of Social Robotics. This Special Issue is based on the conjunction of our SCRITA workshop and the TRAITS (The Road to a successful HRI: AI, Trust and ethicS) workshop, which took place at HRI 2021.

Focus of interest

The design of natural human-robot dynamics is a key aspect for ensuring a successful and efficient lasting human-robot interaction (HRI). In particular, it is expected that a robot deployed in human populated environments not only needs to be able to successfully complete a task, involving perception, reasoning and decision-making of other agents and the surroundings, but also needs to show social intelligence to engage people in effective and natural interactions. In such interactions, robots and people need to be able to cooperate to reach a joint goal, which can only be achieved if people accept and trust robots to complete their task and prevent any potential harm (emotional or physical) to people, the environment and themselves. The agents involved need to correctly interpret each other's behaviour, and act accordingly. Finally, several studies have shown that socially aware robots are perceived more positively by people in social contexts and situations. Robots, therefore, should be able to understand and use people's direct and indirect modes of communication, such as verbal and non-verbal cues. Moreover, robots should be able to adapt their behaviours to satisfy people's needs (such as personality, emotions, preferences, habits), and incorporating reactive and predictive meta-cognition models to reason about the situational context (such as its own erroneous behaviours) and provide socially acceptable behaviours.

This special issue will explore successful HRI from a multidisciplinary perspective and shape the design of robots, so that robots: (i) autonomously sense and react to the situation, people and the environment by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) techniques (ii) such that people feel comfortable to interact with robots (iii) and trust them to safely reach intended outcomes, and (iv) by respecting ethical and legal principles.

Submissions are invited from leading researchers in the fields including, but not limited to, the following topics of interest:

  • Impact of social cues on trust in human-robot interaction
  • The impact of social robots on acceptance in HRI
  • Measuring trust in human-robot interaction
  • Trust violation and recovery mechanism in HRI
  • Effects of humans’ acceptance on trust of robots
  • Humans sense of control and trust in robots
  • Trust and assistive robotics
  • Overtrust in robots
  • Antecedent of trust and human-robot trust
  • Enhancing humans trust in robots
  • User profiling and trust in human-robot interaction
  • Evaluation of human-robot interaction quality
  • Human factors affecting successful HRI
  • Mental models in HRI
  • XAI in HRI
  • Trustworthy AI
  • Legal frameworks for trustworthy robotics
  • Ethics implications in HRI

Important dates

  • The submission deadline is 31 March 2022.
  • The review process for submissions will start immediately after reception and accepted manuscripts will be published online with a DOI on an ongoing basis.

How to submit

Intruction for Authors can be found at the following Guidelines. Manuscripts should be submitted in LaTeX. Please use Springer’s LaTeX macro package and choose the formatting option "twocolumn". The submission should include the original source (including all style files and figures) and a PDF version of the compiled output. Word files are also accepted.

LaTeX macro package (zip, 183 kB)

Interested authors can submit their work at https://www.editorialmanager.com/soro.

Please specify the relevant Special Issue S.I.The Road to Successful HRI: Trust, Acceptance, Ethics, Social Signals and AI in the additional information section later in the submission process. The article type should be Original Research or Survey depending on the type of your work.

Guest editors

In case of any questions please contact: