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
Submission deadline: 23 June 2025 (extended)
Workshop date: 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.

This workshop is intended for HRI researchers, roboticists, designers, UX professionals, and others interested in the complexities of real-world interaction. We especially encourage submissions from those conducting field deployments or experimenting outside the lab.

This full-day workshop will feature:

• Keynote talks by leading researchers in HRI,

• Lightning talks and guided discussions,

• Interactive sessions focused on real-world case studies and lessons learned, and

• Panel discussions on failure, transparency, and improving HRI research culture.

This workshop will be in-person only. Given the sensitive and reflective nature of the discussions—particularly around failure, lessons learned, and behind-the-scenes realities—we believe that a shared physical space is essential to foster open, candid, and constructive conversations. Details of the workshop programme will be released soon.

Call for Papers

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

We welcome submissions on topics including, but not limited to:

Technical and Design Perspectives

• Perception, engagement, and multi-user interaction in real environments

• Social signal processing and robust sensing in noisy, dynamic contexts

• Real-time decision-making and error recovery

• Adaptive dialogue and behavior under uncertainty

• Human-aware navigation and path planning

Field Deployment and Evaluation

• Case studies of real-world HRI (successes and/or failures)

• Stakeholder engagement (owners, workers, users)

• Evaluation frameworks for in-the-wild studies

• Lessons learned from long-term or repeated deployments

• Strategies for deployment in schools, hospitals, homes, public venues

Ethical and Cultural Considerations

• Social acceptance, trust, and expectation management

• Cultural contexts and localization of social behaviors

• Responsible innovation, data privacy, and user consent

Meta-Reflections and “Error Culture”

• Failures in HRI: what went wrong and why

• Replication difficulties and limitations of lab-to-field transfer

• Methodological challenges and transparency in reporting

• Embracing failure as a path to innovation and resilience

Submission Details

We accept two types of submissions to PubRob-Fails 2025:

• Full Papers (4–6 pages): considered for oral presentations

• Short Papers / Failure Reports (2–4 pages): considered for poster presentations

All contributions must be written in English and submitted as a PDF file, using the predefined LaTeX or Word templates. Papers do not need to be anonymized (single-blind review process). We welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages, especially those conducting fieldwork, applied HRI, or novel deployments outside the lab.

Contributions should be submitted through EasyChair at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pubrobfails2025

Submission deadline: 23 June 2025

As part of PubRob-Fails 2025, we also plan to create a “Wall of Failures,” an anonymous collection of HRI mishaps, tough lessons, and unexpected outcomes. Anyone from the community is welcome to contribute, whether or not they attend the workshop. Feel free 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
  
  

Questions about PubRob-Fails 2025? Please contact Mary Ellen Foster or Ana Müller.