[meetings][HRI 26] Learning from Things That Go Wrong in HRI: Two Workshops at HRI 2026

[Ana Kirschbaum]

Join us for a full day of reflection, celebration, and constructive learning from failure at HRI 2026!

On March 16, two complementary workshops will explore different scales of “things going wrong” in human–robot interaction, from moment‑to‑moment breakdowns in communication to the complex realities of deploying robots in the wild. We warmly invite all HRI workshop attendees to participate in either or both of the workshops.

Why Attend Both?

Together, these workshops offer two perspectives on failures in HRI:

• Morning: When interactions go wrong, and how repair unfolds.

• Afternoon: When deployments over time go wrong, and how we learn from them.

By attending both, you’ll gain a rich, multi‑level understanding of how errors shape HRI and how embracing them can lead to more robust, trustworthy, and socially responsive robot systems.

We hope you’ll join us for one or both sessions, and help make this a day of open, constructive, and engaging conversation about the wonderfully imperfect nature of human-robot interaction!

Morning Workshop (09:30-13:00)

Errors, Mistakes, and Failures in Humans and Robots

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/emfhri26/home 

This workshop focuses on failures within an individual interaction: how errors arise, how humans and robots respond, and what these breakdowns reveal about communication, trust, and safety in HRI. It aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across robotics, HCI, cognitive science, and the social sciences, all centred on the micro‑level messiness that shapes real‑time human-robot communication.

Themes include:

• Human‑induced, robot‑induced, and interaction-induced errors

• Misunderstandings, misrecognitions, and live interactional repair

• Impacts of framing, timing, and social signalling

• Methods for detecting, mitigating, and recovering from errors (restoring trust)

• Error typologies, repair strategies, and design challenges in social interaction

Invited Speakers:

• Tom Williams (Colorado School of Mines)

• Ilaria Torre (Chalmers University of Technology)

Afternoon Workshop (14:30-18:00)

Failing Forward: Design and Deployment Lessons from Real‑World HRI

Website: https://sites.google.com/monash.edu/failfowardhri2026 

The afternoon turns to failure in real‑world robot deployments: the unpredictable, multi‑layered challenges that arise when robots leave the lab and operate in schools, hospitals, public spaces, homes, factories, and beyond.

The workshop will explore:

• Technical, human, organisational, and environmental factors influencing deployment challenges

• Strategies for anticipating, mitigating, and embracing failure in the field

• Methods for analysing failure and transforming it into actionable design insight

• Cross‑domain lessons from diverse deployment contexts

• Ethical, governance, safety, and privacy considerations in real‑world HRI

Activities include:

• Interactive sessions organised around a deployment‑phase taxonomy

• Group discussions where participants reflect on their own studies

• Collaborative refinement of an open‑source tool for planning and analysing field deployments

• Sharing stories from successful, failed, and “somewhere in between” deployments