Student Design Competition

Important Dates

All deadlines are 23:59 AoE.

About the Student Design Competition

The Student Design Competition (SDC) is a venue within the HRI conference where student teams present original human-robot interaction design work to an audience of researchers, practitioners, and judges. The goal of the SDC is to showcase design thinking in HRI: the quality of the interaction design, the clarity of the rationale behind design decisions, and serious engagement with the realities of deploying robots among people.

Submissions are student projects — they are not expected to meet the rigor bar of full papers, and the review process is designed accordingly. What we do expect is serious design thinking.

We invite participants to design robots and interactive systems for the complex, shared, often unpredictable environments where robots increasingly operate — and to show us not only what they designed, but why.

The project can exist in several formats:

• Physical robot systems — new platforms built from scratch, or existing/commercial platforms where the design contribution is a modification, a new interaction, or software-based behavior.
• Software-only systems — e.g., conversational agents, coordination systems, or interfaces mediating human-robot encounters in shared spaces.
• Interaction concepts and scenarios — well-developed interaction designs demonstrated through enactment, video prototyping, Wizard-of-Oz techniques, or similar methods.
• Spatial and service design concepts — designs addressing how robots, people, and public environments are configured around one another.

We are not looking for full-fidelity prototypes or any particular level of autonomy. It is completely acceptable for a robot to be lo-fi or puppeted (“Wizard-of-Oz”) during the demonstration, as long as this is disclosed. Expensive hardware is not required and confers no advantage: a rigorous, well-argued software or conceptual design can win this competition. Conversely, a technically sophisticated robot with a thin or retrofitted interaction story is a poor fit for the SDC.

• Who: student teams. Students at any stage — undergraduate through PhD — and from any discipline are eligible. Multidisciplinary teams are encouraged.
• Team size: 2–5 students. Team members may be at different institutions. No student may be on more than one team.
• Institutional entries: no limit on entries per institution; to foster diversity, teams from many different institutions will be prioritized in the showcase.
• Faculty involvement: faculty advisors may appear as co-authors, but the project must be student-led, and student contributors listed first.
• Can’t find a team? Contact the chairs — if multiple individuals express interest, we will help match you into teams.

Theme: Robots in Public Spaces

The 2027 theme is robots in public spaces, interpreted broadly. We mean physical public and quasi-public environments: sidewalks, plazas, and parks; museums and libraries; airports and train stations; hospital lobbies, elderly-care facilities, and other shared institutional spaces. What these settings have in common is that they are multi-party, socially complex, and messy. Robots in public spaces encounter strangers rather than trained users, bystanders as well as intended users, crowds, queues, children, pets, mobility aids, competing social norms, and people who did not ask to interact with a robot at all.

Think about: In what specific space will the system exist, and do you know enough about how that space actually works day-to-day? Who are the stakeholders — including the people who never chose to encounter your robot? Is the robot supporting activities that already happen in this space, or creating a new one? What could go wrong when the space is crowded, loud, or uncooperative — and what are the risks of introducing a robot at all? Who might the design exclude, and what would change that?

Some example scenarios: a museum guide robot negotiating attention among a school group, a couple, and a solo visitor; a service robot in an elderly-care lobby that must be legible to residents with hearing loss or dementia as well as to visiting families; a sidewalk delivery robot navigating a crowded corridor shared with wheelchair users and strollers; or a voice-based system managing a multi-party queue at an airport gate.

What makes a submission “on theme”

A submission engages the theme when it meets these criteria:

• The interaction is situated in a specific, named public or quasi-public setting — not “anywhere.”
• The design accounts for more than one party: intended users and bystanders, passers-by, staff, or other stakeholders present in the space.
• At least some key design choices exist because the setting is public — they would not make sense for a private, single-user context.
• The submission engages at least one real-world complication of the setting: crowding, noise, uninvited interaction, accessibility, diverse norms, consent, maintenance, or similar.

Work in Progress

Your project does not need to be finished at the submission deadline. Two rules apply:

1. Your paper must describe the final deliverable concretely enough to convince reviewers that it will be strong at the conference. Define your goals and your criteria for “success” clearly from the outset, state what is done and what remains, and show that the remaining work is realistic within the timeline.
2. By the camera-ready deadline (and at the conference), the work you present must be a completed design project as described in your accepted submission.

Reviewers will explicitly assess whether proposed work is achievable in the time available.

Submission Format

SDC submissions will be published in the HRI 2027 proceedings as demonstration papers in the non-archival companion (non-APC) category. The written paper should read as a tightly scoped, design-centric extended abstract, not a full technical paper:

• Length: up to four (4) pages including references.
• Format: HRI 2027 proceedings format.
• Anonymization: SDC submissions are not anonymous.
• Video (optional but strongly encouraged): a video of up to three (3) minutes showing the interaction — enactments, sketches, and rough prototypes are all acceptable at submission time.
• Submission site: will open closer to deadline, check back to stay updated.

The same work may not be published in more than one HRI 2027 track. In particular, submitting the same project to both the SDC and Late-Breaking Reports (LBR) is not permitted; teams found to have duplicate accepted submissions will be asked to choose one track.

What Your Paper Must Include

Every submission must clearly describe:

• Scenario and setting — the public or quasi-public environment, and why it matters for the design.
• Users and stakeholders — who interacts with the system, who is affected by it (including bystanders), and what they need.
• The interaction — what actually happens between people and the robot or system, described concretely.
• Design goals and constraints — what the design is trying to achieve, and the social, physical, ethical, and practical constraints it operates under.
• Design process and rationale — how the team arrived at the design, what alternatives were considered, and why key choices were made.
• Expected or observed user experience — anticipated or evidenced responses from users and bystanders, including potential failure modes.
• Demonstration plan — how the team will demonstrate the work at the conference (live interaction, video-supported demo, enactment, etc.), and, for work in progress, what remains to be completed and by when.
• Representative artifacts — at least one image of the design: sketches, renderings, CAD models, journey maps, storyboards, or photographs.

Technical implementation details should be concise — only as detailed as needed to support the design story and make the interaction claims credible.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated primarily on design quality, rationale, and engagement with public-space challenges — not on raw technical complexity. Reviewers and judges will prioritize:

• Clarity and coherence of the scenario and its public-space context;
• Quality of the interaction design, including multi-party and bystander considerations;
• Depth and transparency of the design process and rationale;
• Engagement with social, ethical, accessibility, and deployment realities;
• How effectively the demonstration (and video, if provided) communicates the core interaction and its value;
• For work in progress: whether the remaining work is realistic before the camera-ready deadline.

Technical robustness matters only to the extent needed to support the interaction being demonstrated. Every reviewed submission will receive constructive written feedback identifying at least one strength and one area for improvement.

Awards

Accepted teams compete for:

1. Best Design Award, selected by the judging panel using the published rubric;
2. Public Spaces Award for the submission that most deeply engages the theme, selected by the judging panel;
3. People’s Choice Award, selected by conference attendees by open vote during the showcase.

At-the-Conference Demonstration

At least one member of each accepted team must register for and attend HRI 2027 in person to present on the day of the SDC showcase; other team members are encouraged to attend in person or participate remotely as they are able.

Accepted teams will present a live or video-supported demonstration of their work in a dedicated demo session open to judges and conference attendees. Demonstrations may take the form of live interaction with a physical or software system, structured enactments or Wizard-of-Oz demonstrations, or video-supported presentations with interactive elements. Every team must bring something physical to anchor the conversation; where travel makes that impossible, a poster (plus the video) is acceptable. Teams should design their demonstration to let judges and attendees experience or vividly understand the core interaction, and should be prepared to discuss their design rationale with judges.

After acceptance, the chairs will contact each team to ask what they plan to bring and what setup support they need (table, power, speakers, floor space, etc.).

Funding and Support

The SDC cannot currently guarantee travel funding. We will be collecting funding and cost information with the submission in the case that funding becomes available. Because of this, students seeking support should consider: the IEEE RAS travel grant program; the HRI Student Volunteers program, which waives conference registration; the HRI Pioneers Workshop; and scholarships at their home institutions. We encourage low-cost prototyping — existing university resources, inexpensive and recycled materials — and remind teams that hardware cost plays no role in evaluation.