Semantic Scene Understanding for Human-Robot Interaction

Service robots will be co-located with human users in an unstructured human-centered environment and will benefit from understanding the user's daily activities, preferences, and needs towards fully assisting them. This workshop aims to explore how abstract semantic knowledge of the user's environment can be used as a context in understanding and grounding information regarding the user's instructions, preferences, habits, and needs. While object semantics have primarily been investigated for robotics in the perception and manipulation domain, recent works have shown the benefits of semantic modeling in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) context toward understanding and assisting human users. This workshop focuses on semantic information that can be useful in generalizing and interpreting user instructions, modeling user activities, anticipating user needs, and making the internal reasoning processes of a robot more interpretable to a user. Therefore, the workshop builds on topics from prior workshops such as Learning in HRI, behavior adaptation for assistance, and learning from humans and aims at facilitating cross-pollination across these domains through a common thread of utilizing abstract semantics of the physical world towards robot autonomy in assistive applications. We envision the workshop to touch on research areas such as unobtrusive learning from observations, preference learning, continual learning, enhancing the transparency of autonomous robot behavior, and user adaptation. The workshop aims to gather researchers working on these areas and provide fruitful discussions towards autonomous assistive robots that can learn and ground scene semantics for enhancing HRI.