AAAI 2023 Spring Symposium on HRI in Academia and Industry: Bridging the Gap

On March 27–29, 2023, the AAAI symposium on “HRI in Academia and Industry: Bridging the Gap” was held in a hybrid format, with both in-person and remote participants, gathering Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and national research laboratories to find common ground, understand the different constraints at play, and determine how to work together. The use of robots that operate in spaces in which humans are physically co-present is growing at a dramatic rate. We are seeing more and more robots in our warehouses, on our streets, and even in our homes. All of these robots will interact with humans in some way, whether intentionally or unintentionally. To be successful, their interactions with humans will have to be carefully designed. For more than a decade, the field of HRI has been growing at the intersection of robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) , human-computer interaction (HCI), psychology, and other fields; however, until quite recently, it has been a largely academic area, with university researchers proposing, implementing, and reporting on experiments at a limited scale. With the current increase of commercially-available robots, HRI is starting to make its way into the robotics industry in a meaningful way. This symposium brought together HRI researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and national research laboratories to find common ground, understand the different constraints at play, and determine how to effectively work together.