Due to unfortunate circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to cancel the workshop and sincerely apologize for any inconveniences caused.

Welcome

Robots have increasingly been deployed in-the-wild, both for research and commercial purposes. Such robots deliver food, give information, or perform cleaning tasks. While these robots are often designed and well calibrated for their desired task, the variability of the people surrounding them means the robots are likely to face unexpected human behavior throughout their deployment.

As these unexpected behaviors are infrequent or related to failure, they often aren’t included or discussed in research papers or datasets. Additionally, the infrequency of these events means that often only experienced researchers can assimilate these instances into best practices and lessons learned for deploying robots in-the-wild. We hope to collect these unexpected events and make them available to the HRI research community. With this database, the events can then be categorized (e.g., underlying causes, external influences) and used to understand these unexpected behaviors to ultimately design countermeasures.

We plan to kick off this effort during a workshop held at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. The goal of our workshop is to bring in various researchers working in “in the wild HRI” and discuss the potential lessons from these unexpected behaviors, identify potential new research directions, and provide lessons for researchers on potential unexpected behaviors that may happen in their own system.

You can participate in our efforts by:

• Contributing a paper that describes your experience deploying a robot "in the wild"

• Contributing an anecdote about an unexpected event when you deployed your robot.

• Sign up and join our workshop!