[meetings][CFP] HRI 2026 Workshop - Failing Forward: Design and Deployment Lessons from Real-World Human-Robot Interaction

[Mary Ellen Foster]

Dear All,

We are excited to invite participation and contribution for our workshop "Failing Forward: Design and Deployment Lessons from Real-World Human-Robot Interaction" (https://sites.google.com/monash.edu/failfowardhri2026/) held at HRI 2026 (https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2026/) on 16 March 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

This in-person, half-day workshop invites researchers and practitioners to share their design and deployment lessons drawn from across the spectrum of real-world HRI.

The interactive sessions will follow a taxonomy of the key phases during field deployment and major factors at play, inviting attendees to review the experimental design of their own research or example projects to identify potential challenges and share related experiences.

Discussion groups will refine this taxonomy, which we plan to release as an open-source tool to empower researchers and practitioners in their design and deployment of real-world HRI.

Main Areas We Aim to Explore:

• Technical, human, organizational, and environmental factors that cause deployment challenges.

• Strategies for anticipating and mitigating failures.

• Methods for analyzing failures and turning them into actionable design insights.

• Cross-domain lessons: What can different environments teach social and field robotics?

• Ethical, safety, privacy, and governance considerations.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Human unpredictability, stakeholder alignment, and cultural/social factors.

• Robust perception and planning under uncertainty.

• Error detection, recovery, prevention, and trust repair.

• Long-term, in-situ evaluation and data quality challenges.

• Governance, safety, privacy and ethical frameworks.

We believe that sharing what didn't work is just as valuable as what did! For interested participants, we invite submission of a short paper outlining their deployment stories and to prepare a poster based on the paper (authors are responsible for printing and bringing their posters to the venue). Where participants consent, the papers and posters will be published on the workshop website.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: 15 February 2026

• Acceptance Notification: 2 March 2026 

Please submit a 1-4 page paper in the HRI 2026 LBR format (https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2026/late-breaking-reports/) via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=failforwardhri2026), supplementary materials welcomed. Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner. 

For further information or inquiries, please contact the corresponding workshop organizer at Leimi...@csiro.au