Real-World HRI in Public and Private Spaces: Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned (PubRob-Fails 2025)

Held in conjunction with IEEE RO-MAN 2025
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
29 August 2025

Workshop overview

As robots become more integrated into everyday life—serving as receptionists, tour guides, home assistants, or companions—they face the complex realities of real-world deployment: unpredictable environments, dynamic social contexts, and human expectations that often exceed current capabilities.

PubRob-Fails 2025 invites researchers, designers, and practitioners to reflect critically on the technical, social, and organisational challenges of deploying robots in public and private spaces. We encourage open discussion of both successes and failures, including stories that rarely make it into traditional conference sessions—those involving unexpected breakdowns, messy real-world data, and valuable lessons learned.

This workshop offers a platform to explore what happens when robots meet reality, and how the HRI community can grow by sharing not only what works, but what doesn’t. Embracing a culture of “failing forward,” we aim to transform setbacks into steppingstones for progress, fostering a culture of error, acknowledgement, and transparency that can unlock the full potential of HRI research.

We believe that sharing what didn't work is just as valuable as what did.

Invited speakers

Randy Gomez, Honda Research Institute, Japan
Tony Belpaeme, Ghent University, Belgium
Merihan Alhafnawi, Princeton University, USA

Papers

• Full paper: Why Report Failed Interactions With Robots?! Towards Vignette-based Interaction Quality [paper]
  Agnes Axelsson, Merle Reimann, Ronald Cumbal, Hannah Pelikan, and Divesh Lala

• Full paper: Observations of atypical users from a pilot deployment of a public-space social robot in a church [paper]
  Andrew Blair, Peggy Gregory, and Mary Ellen Foster

• Short paper: Care Robots for Aging Societies: Integration of Edge-Assisted Robotic Monitoring and Emotion-Adaptive Interaction
  Midori Sugaya

• Short paper: Into the Wild: When Robots Are Not Welcome [paper]
  Shaul Ashkenazi, Gabriel Skantze, Jane Stuart-Smith, and Mary Ellen Foster

As part of PubRob-Fails 2025, we also created a “Wall of Failures,” an anonymous collection of HRI mishaps, tough lessons, and unexpected outcomes. Anyone from the community is welcome to contribute or follow: https://padlet.com/oliverchojnowski/mein-schickes-padlet-sw5mvg2la3dbjv0t

Organisers

Mary Ellen Foster, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Ana Müller, Cologne Cobots Lab, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Manuel Giuliani, Kempten University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Ron Petrick, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
Caterina Neef, Cologne Cobots Lab, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences / SARAI Lab, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Sara Cooper, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Michael Schiffmann, Cologne Cobots Lab, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Alexander Eberhard, Cologne Cobots Lab, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Oliver Chojnowski, Cologne Cobots Lab, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences
Barbara Bruno, SARAI Lab, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany