ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction! It is an exciting time to be part of the HRI community. Across its publication venues, Human-Robot Interaction is producing a burgeoning and compelling body of intellectual activity. ACM THRI is truly honored to participate in these developments as the first robotics journal offered by ACM Publications. As Editors-in-Chief, Chad and I are privileged to work with an esteemed and thoughtful editorial board in our consideration of research comprising the leading thought in HRI. Our editorial board has been thrilled to see inspiring research flowing through the journal, across the Behavioral/Social, Computational, Design, and Mechanical sections, and remain excited for the new work to come. In complement to ACM THRI, this March witnessed the gathering of the largest-ever group of almost 650 Human-Robot Interaction scholars in Chicago for the annual ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference. As the community of HRI researchers grows, we must ever more carefully consider how to keep up the rigorous nature of HRI research, while working to include a greater diversity of perspectives into the conversation. Being the premier journal in the field of HumanRobot Interaction, ACM THRI considers broad representation of high quality work as central to its mission. We are therefore committed to enabling the inclusion and dissemination of HRI research across disciplinary and geographical audiences, and to broadening the field’s scientific and societal impact. To highlight our aims for HRI and ACM THRI, this inaugural issue has focused on the topic of “New Frontiers for Human-Robot Interaction” with a combination of opinion editorials and top-quality research articles. Among these research articles, Bowen and Alterovitz present new insights into motion planning for dynamic human environments through the estimation of cost functions learned from demonstration. Carrillo et al. describe the innovative process of designing a social robotic rehabilitation aid for children with cerebral palsy, performed in the context of clinical deployment and with sustained engagement of diverse stakeholders. Lee and Riek’s critical look at assistive robots being developed for older adults suggests we need to go beyond the deficit