What Actors can Teach Robots

In an age when machines are increasingly entering our daily lives, social robotics focuses on how robots can successfully share spaces, interface, and collaborate with people. Machines that fail to interact appropriately run the risk of becoming irritating and unwelcome; however, when personality and charm are added, functional machines can not only add value to their environment, but also engage, elicit trust, and foster bonds with their human partners. The central idea of this workshop is that even very simple robots, in terms of both sensing and degrees-of-freedom, are capable of charismatic interaction. Acting training can inform the development of such charismatic robots, but it is challenging to operationalize actor knowledge into computational systems. For example, people parse non-verbal communications intuitively, even from machines that do not look like people, and acting training contains explicit methodology for exploring the space of motion-based expression. Robotics researchers can gain insight on how to create interfaces that adapt the knowledge of human charisma experts -- such as actors and performers -- into robotics, developing robot social behaviors with humans in the loop. This workshop will be a forum for discussing minimal social robots and prototyping new ones. The program includes presentations exploring the social role of simple sensors and behaviors, a hands-on activity, and motivating talks from experts in the field. Accepted applicants will be invited to share their perspectives on minimal social robots during highlight talks, discussions, and a poster session. During the workshop, participants will work in small groups to craft an illustrative interaction for a minimalist robot whose communications they have designed. There will also be ample opportunities for early researchers to connect with experts in this field. A public website will provide an archive of accepted submissions and minimal social robot interaction videos in order to share the output of the workshop with the larger community.