Welcome to PubRob

The Workshop & Tutorial Series on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction

About the PubRob series

The development of robots capable of interacting with humans has made tremendous progress in the last decade, leading to an expectation that in the near future, robots will be increasingly deployed in public spaces, for example as receptionists, shop assistants, waiters, or bartenders. In these scenarios, robots must necessarily deal with situations that require socially appropriate human-robot interactions of a specific nature: interactions that are short and dynamic, and where the robot has to be able to deal with multiple persons at once. In order to do so, robots typically require specific skills, including robust video and audio processing, fast reasoning and decision making mechanisms, and natural and safe output path planning algorithms. As a result, research on public space robots is often fundamentally different from other work in social robotics and human-robot interaction that focuses on long-term, robot companions who interact with humans in one-on-one interactions.

The workshop/tutorial series aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines, in order to explore this dynamic research area from different perspectives.