Workshop Overview

As robotic systems reach higher technology readiness levels, they usually interact with real users in realistic application contexts at scale. In such real-world HRI, failures and unexpected outcomes are common—and can provide valuable lessons for future design and evaluation.

This half-day workshop builds on two recent workshops—HRI 2025 workshop on Human-Robot Interaction in Extreme and Challenging Environments and RO-MAN 2025 workshop on Real-World HRI in Public and Private Spaces: Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned.

We invite researchers and practitioners to this interactive, half-day workshop to share their design and deployment lessons drawn from across the spectrum of real-world HRI.

The interactive sessions will follow a taxonomy of the key phases during field deployment and major factors at play, inviting attendees to review the experimental design of their own research or example projects to identify potential challenges and share related experiences.

Discussion groups will refine this taxonomy, which we plan to release as an open-source tool to empower researchers and practitioners in their design and deployment of real-world HRI.

Main Areas We Aim to Explore:

• Technical, human, organizational, and environmental factors that cause deployment challenges.

• Strategies for anticipating and mitigating failures.

• Methods for analyzing failures and turning them into actionable design insights.

• Cross-domain lessons: What can different environments teach social and field robotics?

• Ethical, safety, privacy, and governance considerations.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Human unpredictability, stakeholder alignment, and cultural/social factors.

• Robust perception and planning under uncertainty.

• Error detection, recovery, prevention, and trust repair.

• Long-term, in-situ evaluation and data quality challenges.

• Governance, safety, privacy and ethical frameworks.

Call for Contributions

This workshop is intended for HRI researchers, roboticists, designers, UX professionals, as well as those working in application domains such as healthcare, disaster response, industrial inspection, service robotics, and public-space deployments—anyone who deploys robots in the wild and faces the complexities of real-world interaction.

This workshop will be held in person only: given the sensitive and reflective nature of the discussions, particularly around failure, lessons learned, and behind-the-scenes realities, a shared physical space is essential to foster open, candid, and constructive

conversations.

We believe that sharing what didn't work is just as valuable as what did! For interested participants, we invite submission of a short paper outlining their deployment stories and to prepare a poster based on the paper (authors are responsible for printing and bringing their posters to the venue). Where participants consent, the papers and posters will be published on the workshop website.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: 15 February, 2026

• Acceptance Notification: 2 March, 2026 

Please submit a 1-4 page paper in the HRI 2026 LBR format via EasyChair, supplementary materials welcomed. Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner. 

For further information or inquiries, please contact the corresponding workshop organizer at Leimin.Tian@csiro.au