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Robots are being increasingly used in the fight against highly-infectious diseases such as Ebola, MERS, and SARS-COV-2. Many of the robots that are being used employ ultraviolet lights mounted on a mobile base to inactivate the pathogens. However, these lights are often mounted in a fixed configuration and do not provide adequate decontamination of horizontal surfaces, which can be a major source of cross-contamination. In the paper, we describe the design, implementation, and testing of an Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI) system implemented on a mobile manipulation robot. A human supervisor designates a surface for disinfection, the robot autonomously plans and executes an end-effector trajectory to disinfect the surface to the required certainty, and then displays the results for the human supervisor to verify. We also provide some background information on UVGI and describe how we constructed and validated mathematical models of Ultraviolet (UV) radiation propagation and accumulation. Finally, we describe our implementation on a Fetch mobile manipulation platform, and discuss how the practicalities of implementation on a real robot affect our models., 7 pages, 15 images

Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgments about privacy would seem to be context-dependent, but none of the promising work on contextual "frames" has focused on privacy concerns. This work studies the impact of contextual "frames" on local users' privacy judgments in a home telepresence setting. Our methodology consists of using an online questionnaire to collect responses to animated videos of a telepresence robot after framing people with an introductory paragraph. The results of four studies indicate a large effect of manipulating the robot operator's identity between a stranger and a close confidante. It also appears that this framing effect persists throughout several videos. These findings serve to caution HRI researchers that a change in frame could cause their results to fail to replicate or generalize. We also recommend that robots be designed to encourage or discourage certain frames., Revised version was later accepted to the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)

Research into smart wheelchairs has been conducted for decades, but we have yet to see the widespread use of this technology among full-time wheelchair users. We argue that the main reason for this is that there is a mismatch between research and the actualities of using a powered mobility device in the real world. Based on our own research experiences, we enumerate some of these disparities, and offer some suggestions for where work in smart wheelchairs might focus in the coming years.

The introduction of robots into our society will also introduce new concerns about personal privacy. In order to study these concerns, we must do human-subject experiments that involve measuring privacy-relevant constructs. This paper presents a taxonomy of privacy constructs based on a review of the privacy literature. Future work in operationalizing privacy constructs for HRI studies is also discussed., 5 pages double-column, 1 figure, PDFLaTeX