Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: December 8, 2025, 11:59 pm AoE
- Review Deadline: January 5, 2026
- Notification of Acceptance: January 12, 2026
- Camera-Ready Version: January 30, 2026, 11:59 pm AoE
The Industry White Paper Track is a new pilot initiative for HRI 2026 that provides a dedicated venue for industry practitioners, applied researchers, and cross-sector teams to share practical experiences from real-world human-robot interaction. Unlike traditional research papers, these white papers focus on practice, deployment, and reflection rather than formal experimentation or publication. They highlight the realities of robotics in production and operational environments — where success depends on factors often invisible in academic contexts: reliability, user adoption, maintenance, integration, safety, and business viability. The goal is to foster a shared understanding of the unique challenges, trade-offs, and insights that arise when HRI systems leave the lab and enter the world. Submissions should illuminate lessons that could help others facing similar constraints, rather than promote specific products or services.
Note: The Industry White Paper Track is non-archival. Accepted papers will not appear in the ACM/IEEE proceedings but will be shared via the conference website
Scope and Purpose
We invite submissions that cover, but are not limited to:
- Case studies of successful or failed robotic system integrations in human-robot interaction contexts (e.g., service robots in hospitality, social robots in eldercare, manufacturing cobots, logistics robots, field robots interacting with humans).
- Deployments of robotic systems in realistic operational environments, with lessons learned (technical, human-factors, organisational, business models).
- Practical challenges and solutions around human-robot interaction in industry: scalability, robustness, user acceptance, ethical/social issues, safety, maintenance, regulatory/compliance, and sustainability.
- Innovation in interaction design, system architecture, and human-robot teaming in industry settings, with a focus on applicability and transfer beyond the immediate case.
- Collaborations between academia and industry: how they were structured, managed, what worked, what didn’t.
- Insights on evaluation, metrics, real-world performance, long-term use, adaptation, and continuous improvement of robotic systems in human-robot contexts.
- We especially encourage submissions that identify patterns or recurring challenges across domains — insights that could benefit other practitioners, researchers, and developers confronting similar realities.
Submission Guidelines
To make a new submission, log on to https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions and select the following from the dropdown lists:
HRI (Society) -> HRI 2026 (Conference/Journal) -> HRI 2026 Industry White Papers (Track)
Requirements for Submission:
- Length: Up to 4 pages (double-column) including figures, excluding references. Use the ACM “sigconf” template.
- Anonymisation: Since this is an industry-oriented track, we allow author names, affiliations and logos — but we strongly discourage marketing-style language, product branding, and must ensure the submission emphasises insights, not advertisement.
- Format: PDF format, compatible with the ACM workflow.
- Supplementary Materials: Authors may optionally provide a link to supplementary material (e.g., data, videos, system photos) but this does not replace the main document or count beyond the 4-page limit.
- Evaluation Criteria: Relevance to human-robot interaction practice, clarity of lessons learned, novelty of insights, generalisability to the community, rigour of reflection (even if not academic lab-style), readability and accessibility to both industry and academic audiences.
- Presentation: Accepted papers will be presented as posters during HRI 2026 Industry Day, with opportunities for discussion and exchange among authors, practitioners, and researchers. At least one author of the accepted papers will need to register to HRI to attend the Industry Day and present the work in person.
- Non-Archival: Submissions are reviewed and presented but not included in the archival conference proceedings. Authors retain copyright and may later publish extended versions elsewhere.
Note: HRI Partners may attend Industry Day without an accepted White Paper. Submissions are strongly encouraged from both Partners and from industry practitioners or applied researchers outside the Partner network, to enrich the exchange of practical insights across sectors.
Contact & Further Information
For any questions regarding this track, please contact the Industry Chairs at industry2026@humanrobotinteraction.org