HRI

Welcome one and all to the 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)!

We are so pleased to re-welcome the HRI community to Boulder, Colorado, where HRI 2021 would have been held, had the COVID pandemic not interfered. Following up on the successful in-person conference held last year in Sweden, this year's theme is "HRI in the Real World," and focuses on advances that aim to bring human-robot interaction out of the lab and into everyday life.

One aspect of this that we are very excited about is the introduction of a robot challenge to the conference activities, where teams from around the world will showcase their research and development via actual, interactive robots in the "real world" of an academic conference. It is our hope that this feature will grow and develop over the coming years into a staple of the HRI conference.

This year's HRI conference saw an impressive surge in global interest, with 352 full paper submissions from around the world, marking a significant 40% increase compared to the previous year. These papers were categorized under relevant thematic subcommittees and underwent a double-blind review process, a rebuttal phase, and selective shepherding by the HRI program committee. From this process, 87 outstanding papers (24.7%) were chosen for full presentation at the conference. Reflecting our joint sponsorship with IEEE and ACM, all accepted papers will be accessible in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore.