Call for Contributions

IMPORTANT DATES

March 25th: Submission deadline 23:59/11:59 pm Central European time 

April 10th: Notification of acceptance

April 24th: Camera ready paper

June 1st: Workshop (full-day)

OVERVIEW

We are witnessing the transition of robots from labs to publicly accessible spaces where they interact more with a diverse range of people in different contexts. This requires an increased focus on Human-Robot-Interaction, raising inherent ethical and legal issues. The workshop will enable participants to better understand the impact of different assessments and potential measures concerning robot ethics on design and deployment. Gaining insight into current regulations, standards and initiatives addressing ethical and legal issues will benefit both researchers and developers. That is by considering how these can open new directions in robotics and automation research.

Being able to employ measures to address the implications and issues is vital to making robots more acceptable and trustworthy, and fundamental for responsible research and innovation. The workshop will cover key aspects through concrete examples from ongoing research projects, and applied work on legal considerations, development of relevant standards, universal design principles and more. This will be from an international perspective, with speakers representing the global north and south and with emphasis on gender, cultural and ethnic diversity.

Attend the WORKSHOP

The workshop will be given on-site only with no hybrid option. To be able to attend the workshop, please make registration for "Workshops and Tutorials" at the ICRA web page, 22 May 2026 at the latest (early rate registration deadline 31 March). The registration for the main ICRA conference does not include workshops/tutorials.

FORMAT AND SUBMISSION

Authors are required to submit a 2-page extended abstract or 4 page short paper or 6 page full paper as PDF in the standard IEEE ICRA A4 conference format (see templates here or for Overleaf here). However, the review is single-blind, so please add author names and affiliation to the paper (and you don't have to blind anything in the paper itself). We invite paper submissions of novel and earlier unpublished work within the theme of the workshop. We also welcome presentations of recently published journal papers within the scope of the workshop (please submit a 1-page summary with reference to the published paper).

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=worobet2026 

The authors of the accepted full papers (four pages or more) will be invited to submit an extended version for tentative inclusion in a book to be published in the Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics book series (approved).

PAPER SELECTION

The abstracts and papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop organizing committee and judged based on relevance to the workshop topics, technical quality, and novelty. Authors of accepted papers are expected to give a lightning talk (3-5 minutes) and present a poster at the workshop. A number of full papers will be selected for a longer 15-minute oral presentation. The authors of the accepted full papers will be invited to submit an extended version for tentative inclusion in a future book (pending). Other accepted abstracts/papers for the workshop will be published on the workshop web page. 

SCOPE AND TOPICS

The main objective of the ICRA2026 workshop is to raise awareness, prompt debate and share knowledge about ethical, legal and user/social perspectives for robot assistants operating in personal and public environments with humans. We invite interested authors to submit their original and unpublished work to this workshop.

A list of topics addressed in the workshop (but are not limited to):

• Human-Centered Robotics; Ethics and Philosophy; Robot Safety

• Privacy, Security, Safety, and Diversity (accessibility and inclusion) – also known under the umbrella term of Responsible Robotics 

• Ethical Challenges, Legal issues (ELSI) and Standards related to robotics 

• Social Assistive Robots within home and healthcare services

• Ambient assisted living

• Ambient sensor systems

• Emotion classification

• Human-robot interaction

• Medical state classification and forecasting

• Mobile sensing

• Multi-sensor fusion

• Privacy in human monitoring

• Remote sensing and monitoring

• Responsible robotics

• Robot companion sensing

• Robot companion control

• Robotics ethics

• Sensitive data collection and storage

• Smart home technologies

• Social robots

On the use of AI or AI-assisted technologies:

When submitting to WOROBET 2026 workshop, the authors acknowledge that they comply with the Generative AI usage policy, based on existing policies proposed by IEEE, ACM, and Springer. It is forbidden to:

• List Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, as authors of works;

• Use texts or sections entirely produced by generative AI tools

It is allowed (with explicit disclosure in the acknowledgments) to:

• Use generative AI tools to create parts of the content, with disclosure in the paper acknowledgments indicating what was generated and which tool was used. It is important to check the terms of use of the tool, which is the responsibility of the authors. For example, in the acknowledgments, you can use: ChatGPT was used to generate the first paragraph of Section 3 and to generate Table 3.2.

It is allowed (no need to disclose):

• Use AI or AI-assisted technologies to improve the quality of images in terms of contrast and clarity;

• Utilize generative AI tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text (similar to an assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, and engagement).