HRI: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

The premier academic conference on human-robot interaction, jointly sponsored by ACM and IEEE. Covers social robotics, assistive robotics, teleoperation, user studies, and interaction design. Researchers extensively use open-source robot platforms (TurtleBot, PR2, Pepper, etc.) and commonly release code and datasets with publications.

Organiser: ACM / IEEE
Founded: 2006
Frequency: annual
Usually held in: March
Duration: 4 days
Typical attendance: 400-600
Audience: HRI researchers, social robotics researchers, UX researchers
Topics: human-robot interaction, social robotics, assistive robotics, teleoperation, user studies, interaction design, collaborative robots
Tags: human-robot-interaction, social-robotics, research

Next edition

HRI 2027, Mar 8 – 12, 2027, Santa Clara, CA, USA

Keynote speakers

Yukie Nagai (International Research Center for Neurointelligence, University of Tokyo): Predictive Brain in Robots and Children: Toward Social Intelligence
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (Animal-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Glasgow): More Than Human-Robot Interaction
Benjamin Rosman (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa): Who Gets Represented in Robot Intelligence? Human-Robot Interaction, Societal Context, and the Future of Autonomy
Benjamin R. Cowan (University College Dublin): Collaborating with Conversational Agents: Perspective Taking, Partner Modelling and the Division of Communicative Labour

Workshops

Designing Transparent and Understandable Robots (D-TUR), Monday March 16 (Morning): Explores how to make autonomous robots more comprehensible to humans by bridging cognitive science, social robotics, ML, and HCI perspectives.
Methodological Innovation in Designing Sensations and Sentiments from Robot Touch, Monday March 16 (Morning): Explores methodological approaches for designing robot-human touch interactions that prioritize felt sensory experience over purely functional efficiency.
Unpacking Lived Experiences of Wizards of Oz, Monday March 16 (Morning): Examines ethical, practical, and methodological dimensions of Wizard of Oz research, surfacing first-person experiences of researchers who enact roles within this experimental paradigm.
3rd Workshop on Designerly HRI: Articulating the Value of Design Research for HRI, Monday March 16 (Morning): Third edition exploring how design research methods and perspectives can uniquely contribute to advancing human-robot interaction.
Robots for Care: Exploring Downstream Socio-Ethical Effects and Upstream Interventions, Monday March 16 (Morning): Examines how robots deployed in clinical and assistive contexts create social, ethical, and organizational consequences, and explores early-stage design and policy interventions.
Robots for Communities, Monday March 16 (Morning): Explores how robots can serve as shared social resources supporting collective well-being, moving beyond individual robotics to robots as communal assets.
Errors, Mistakes and Failures in Humans and Robots (EMF-HRI), Monday March 16 (Morning): Examines errors across human-robot interaction including human-induced, robot-induced, and communication breakdowns, focusing on social framing and recovery strategies.
InterAI: Interactive AI for Human-Centered Robotics (2nd edition), Monday March 16 (Morning): Explores advancements in human-centered interactive AI within HRI, emphasizing real-time interaction with transparency regarding data control and algorithmic operations.
Expressive Robot Faces with Vizij: A Workshop/Tutorial Hybrid, Monday March 16 (Full Day): Morning: paper presentations and expert panels on emotional expression and gaze in HRI. Afternoon: hands-on tutorial with the Vizij open-source platform for rendered robot faces.
Roboticist's Guide to Working with Children: A Playful by Design Workshop, Monday March 16 (Full Day): Co-creating a practical guide to working with children in robot interaction research, using the 'Playful by Design' tool to navigate ethical complexities.
ROOTS-HRI: Responsible Outcomes and Operational Tools for Sustainability in HRI (2nd edition), Monday March 16 (Full Day): Shifts from conceptual exploration to practical implementation, producing actionable guidelines for integrating sustainability into HRI research.
Workshop YOUR Study Design 2026 (6th edition), Monday March 16 (Full Day): Enhances quality of HRI research through participatory critique, where researchers receive guidance from expert mentors on study proposals.
Failing Forward: Design and Deployment Lessons from Real-World HRI, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Lessons learned from real-world HRI deployments, examining failures and unexpected outcomes across robotic systems in the field.
BPM-HRI: Best Practices and Methods in HRI Research, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Addresses gaps in experimental design practices and standardized reporting guidelines in HRI, consolidating international initiatives.
LEAP-HRI: Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term HRI (6th edition), Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Focuses on evolving assistance for everyday life — how robots can progressively adapt their support to suit diverse individuals with unique and changing needs.
Cruel Optimism, Lucid Despair, and Precarious Hope in HRI, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Examines how global socio-political turbulence shapes HRI research, using three affective orientations as analytical lenses to question dominant narratives.
MAgicS-HRI: Multi-Agentic Systems in HRI, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Explores how robots should represent, coordinate, and communicate the behaviors of multiple underlying AI agents, addressing autonomy, transparency, and user mental models.
Equitable Robotics for Wellbeing (EqRoW), Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Brings together technical and social perspectives on how robots can serve marginalized and vulnerable communities, emphasizing equity as a practical design goal.
A Tutorial for Finding and Evaluating HRI Scales, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Equips researchers with tools to identify suitable measurement scales and evaluate their quality through practical psychometric theory instruction.
Third International Workshop on Worker-Robot Relations: Futuring Worker Empowerment, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Uses worldbuilding for envisioning futures where robotic systems support worker wellbeing and empowerment at individual, organizational, and societal levels.
HuRoCo: Empowering Human-Robot Communication Through Non-Linguistic Pathways, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Explores non-linguistic communication including non-verbal voice interactions and extra-linguistic signals to foster more inclusive human-robot interaction.
Exploring the Safety, Trust, Psychosocial, Legal and Economic Impact of Cyber Attacks on Social Robots, Monday March 16 (Afternoon): Examines cybersecurity threats to social robots, covering trustable, secure, and safe robotics at scale.

Open Source Robotics

HRI: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

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