Human Robot Interaction (HRI) 2025
Cool papers from the premier gathering in how humans will be consumers of robots
Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is the premier venue for all academic research and industry things related to way humans might interact with robots in environments ranging from classrooms, homes, on the street, hospitals and work environments. We have been a big fan of this conference and wrote about this extensively in previous years: 2024, 2023, and 2022.
Last week, HRI-2025 was held in Melbourne, Australia from March 2-6 2025. HRI is a huge conference with a lot of workshops and research material… so it will take some time for me to go through the material. One bummer this year was that the organizers didn’t have a virtual registration unlike previous years, which I usually used to listen into sessions via Zoom. Also unlike previous years, there is much lesser material on social media, particularly X, may be because researchers have moved away from X.
As I walk my way through the proceedings, here are some interesting stats from the conference which might give you some idea on important topics that have captivated researcher’s attention over the last year. The dominant themes were humanoids and Large Language Models (LLMs)… there were 82 research papers on the theme of humanoids and 72 research papers exploring the use of LLMs (Out of which 7 papers were using OpenAI). Out of social robots used, 31 papers mentioned the Nao robot, 34 papers mentioned the Pepper robot, 15 mentioned the Furhat robot.. showing that most academic research is focused on these three robots.
One piece of work which might of interest to many of our readers who own the Petoi Bittle robot tried to measure the creepiness index of different social robots including Bittle robot. The study found that many users of robots find them either cute or creepy… and the perception varies across users with factors like functional clarity and anthropomorphism (adding human traits to a robot) affecting the perception of the user.
We also saw interesting pieces of work from research authors about whom we have written about in this forum in the past. This paper explored the process of repair of consumer robots in Japan to better understand the
social and technical infrastructure that helps people get their robots repair and maintain the emotional attachment and continued relationships with robots. Another interesting research paper led by Amy Koike explored how humans would interact with a humanoid robot named Sota deployed for 2 days in a popular shopping mall in Japan. We were also impressed by how an autonomous agent such as the one in a self-driving car could be used to train people to be better drivers.
I expect to write in more detail on some of these pieces of work. If any of our readers attended HRI-2025 and would like to contribute a comment or note on their experience, please reach DM me.