The first workshop on Human-Robot Interaction in Extreme and Challenging environments (exactingHRI 2025) focuses on the difficult cases where HRI is tested in the wild, over extended periods, at target locations, or with target users. We invite discussions on challenges brought by the complexities in the human, task, and environmental factors, the limitations of the robot's autonomy, the knowledge and data availability, and the hardware and software design, as well as the missing theoretical, methodological, or governance frameworks to investigate exactingHRI.
We hope this workshop will facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations in HRI, field robotics, and AI, to accelerate research and applications that benefit "Robots for a Sustainable World". For example, effective human-robot teams for conservation efforts that contribute to the UN Sustainable Development goal of "Climate action", or personalised care robots that contribute to the Sustainable Development goal of "Good health and well-being".
Topics of interest in the exactingHRI workshop include:
User factors:
Personal and adaptive interaction, explainable HRI
Multimodal behaviour analytics in-the-wild
Supervisory interfaces for improved situational awareness and reduced cognitive load
Value alignment, cultural and social norms, participatory and co-design, ethical requirements
Robot factors:
Robust perception, planning and actions in uncertain and complex environments
Error detection, prevention, and recovery
HRI under low-cost, limited compute or communication constraints
Task and interaction factors:
Risks and safety constraints
Long-term HRI, attrition in use, abandonment
Robots in public spaces, field deployment and in-situ evaluation of HRI
Shared autonomy, collaborative or assistive task execution, trust and trust repair, group dynamics
exactingHRI applications, e.g., disaster response, manufacturing and construction, space exploration, retail and hospitality, rehabilitation and care
We use EasyChair as the paper submission and review system. The review will be conducted in a single-blind manner. Accepted submissions will be published on arXiv. In addition, authors of accepted submissions will be invited to submit an extended version of their manuscript to the Frontiers in Robotics and AI research topic on Errors and Mistakes in HRI.
Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=exactinghri2025
Format
All papers for the workshop must be submitted in PDF format and conform to IEEE Proceedings specifications (following the same templates as HRI 2025): Templates are available at this link (use US letter format). In addition, the IEEE has partnered with Overleaf, so you can start writing using the this link directly. Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner.
Page limits (excluding reference and appendix):
6-8 pages for full papers
2-4 pages for short contributions
Paper submission deadline: 16 Feb 2025 (23:59 AoE)
Notification of acceptance: 21 Feb 2025
Camera-ready deadline (published on arXiv): 28 Feb 2025 (23:59 AoE)
Workshop date: 3 Mar 2025