Objectives

One important goal of the workshop is to obtain a clearer idea of the state-of-the art in human-robot handovers including the current limitations of what is currently feasible. To this aim the workshop will bring together some of the leading researchers concerned with handovers from different scientific communities.

The workshop is deliberately interdisciplinary with the overarching aim of connecting researchers from different communities with a shared interest in human-human, human-robot, and robot-human handovers and joint action research more generally. We hope that it will provide a fertile ground for future interdisciplinary work aimed at pushing the boundary of the kind of handovers that can be achieved in settings as different as industrial, nuclear, and surgical application areas.

We hope to provide participating roboticists with valuable perspectives and insights from sociology, conversation analysis, cognitive science, and movement understanding analysing human-human handovers and related joint actions. Insights from these fields may lead to a better understanding of the road ahead in terms of currently lacking robotic capabilities in application scenarios such as the ones mentioned above.

Taking the perspective of participating sociologists and cognitive scientists, the workshop may provide them with an overview of the current state-of-the art in robotics including novel sensing capabilities. The latter may be useful for future observational and/or interdisciplinary studies.