Telepresence, teleembodiment, and telexistence represent a spectrum of technologies that enable humans to remotely perceive, interact with, and act within distant physical environmentsthrough robotic systems. From video-mediated social communication to fully immersive robotic avatars, these technologies hold transformative potential for healthcare, social inclusion, disaster response, and remote collaboration. Yet, despite rapid advances in hardware and connectivity, a critical gap remains largely unaddressed: the ergonomic and social design of these systems.

Current telepresence and teleoperation interfaces impose significant physical, cognitive, and social burdens on their users. Prolonged use of head-mounted displays causes discomfort and cybersickness; mismatches between operator movements and robot motions lead to fatigue and errors; and the social dynamics of being “present” through a robotic surrogate, establishing trust, conveying emotion, maintaining engagement, and navigating interpersonal space remain poorly understood and rarely designed for. These are fundamentally ergonomic challenges, encompassing physical, cognitive, and organisational human factors, yet they are seldom framed or addressed as such within the robotics or HRI communities. 

This workshop aims to bridge this gap by bringing together researchers from telepresence, telexistence, social robotics, ergonomics, haptics, and human-robot interaction to:

• Map the physical, cognitive, and social ergonomic challenges specific to remote human-robot interaction across the telepresence–teleembodiment–telexistence continuum.

• Examine how social presence, trust, and emotional communication are affected by the ergonomic quality of telerobotic interfaces and how social HRI insights can inform better telepresence design.

• Present state-of-the-art solutions from haptics, adaptive shared control, and embodied media that can reduce operator fatigue and enhance the quality of remote social interaction.

• Co-create a research roadmap for socially and ergonomically informed design of next-generation remote HRI systems, through an interactive SWOT analysis session with all participants.

• Provide researchers with networking opportunities to discuss challenges and opportunities in telepresence systems, fostering greater collaboration to make future human-robot collaborations more seamless and natural.

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