Industry White Papers

Important Dates

All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Following the success of the Industry White Paper sessions at Industry Day last year, we are excited to announce that Industry White Papers are now part of the main HRI 2027 program and will be included in the archival companion proceedings. With this year’s theme of Innovative HRI, this track is meant to serve as a natural home for work that shows how HRI ideas become deployable real-world systems.

This track offers a dedicated venue for industry practitioners, applied researchers, and cross-sector teams to share practical, real-world lessons from human-robot interaction: the kind of insight that doesn’t always fit a traditional research paper. We invite you to submit your work to the Industry White Paper Track of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2027.

Scope

We welcome submissions on practical, real-world experience deploying and operating HRI systems: the challenges, trade-offs, and lessons that emerge once systems leave the lab.

Topics include, 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 in realistic operational environments, with lessons learned across technical, human-factors, organisational, or business dimensions.
• Practical challenges around scalability, robustness, user acceptance, ethics, safety, maintenance, regulation, and sustainability.
• Innovation in interaction design, system architecture, or human-robot teaming, with a focus on applicability beyond the immediate case.
• Academia-industry collaborations: how they were structured, what worked, what didn’t.
• Insights on evaluation, metrics, real-world performance, and long-term adaptation of deployed systems.

We especially encourage submissions that surface patterns or recurring challenges relevant across domains.

Submission Guidelines

• Length: Up to 4 pages (double-column) including figures, excluding references.
• Anonymization: Submissions to this track are not anonymized. Please include author names and affiliations. However, we strongly discourage the use of marketing-style language and product branding. Please ensure that industry white papers emphasize insight rather than 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 HRI practice, clarity of lessons learned, novelty of insight, generalisability, rigour of reflection (not necessarily academic lab-style), and accessibility to both industry and academic audiences.
• Archival: New this year! Submissions will be included in the archival companion proceedings and made open access.

Submissions are strongly encouraged from both HRI Partners and from industry practitioners or applied researchers outside the Partner network, to enrich the exchange of practical insights across sectors.

Format

Submissions must be in PDF format and conform to ACM Proceedings specifications. Please note that we follow the general ACM SIG format ("sigconf", double column), not the SIGCHI format. Templates are available at this link (US letter).

ACM has partnered with Overleaf, where you can start writing using this link directly. Note that the Overleaf document defaults to the new ACM workflow, which is not what HRI uses — make sure your document uses the sigconf document class rather than the manuscript,screen,review class enabled by default.

Accessibility

We ask all authors to make their submissions as accessible as possible. At minimum: mark up headings and lists using the template's styles, provide a text description for every figure, distinguish elements in figures by shape or pattern as well as colour, create tables and equations as real tables and equations rather than images, and set your document metadata.

Please read the full HRI 2027 accessibility guidelines before submitting. If you have questions or need assistance, contact the Diversity & Accessibility Chairs: diversityaccessibility2027@humanrobotinteraction.org

Publication Policies

Submissions to this track are not subject to Article Processing Charges (APCs). There is no publication fee for authors.

At least one author must register to present the work.

ACM Publication Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Policy on Use of Generative AI

HRI 2027 follows the ACM Policy on Authorship and the ACM Publications Policy FAQ. We do not impose requirements beyond ACM's.

• Using generative AI to help write your submission is permitted and does not need to be disclosed. Your submission as a whole must still be an accurate representation of your own work and novel intellectual contributions, and must not be primarily the product of a tool's generative capabilities.
• If you used generative AI in conducting the research, you must describe that use in detail in the methods section of your paper. This applies to research design and methodology, creation or selection of data sources, experiment design, data generation, collection, or analysis, coding, model implementation, simulations, testing, validation, and deployment. It also applies to artifacts that bear on your conclusions, such as code, datasets, and figures.
• Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors. All named authors are responsible and accountable for every part of the submission, including any AI-generated material, regardless of its source. ACM may reject a submission before publication, or retract it afterwards, where content-integrity problems arising from AI use are identified.