We descended on this year’s Human-Robot Conference (HRI) with 10 people from the Plymouth team: a research budget breaking record. I gave a keynote at the Personal Robots for Exercising and Coaching workshop and the Cognitive and Social Neuroscience Methods for HRI workshop, Daniel Hernandez co-organised the Social Robots in Therapy: Focusing on Autonomy and Ethical Challenges workshop, we presented our alt.HRI paper and had a clutch of Late Breaking Results to show.

This was the largest HRI edition so far, with about 650 delegates. What struck me was the large presence of industry at the conference, probably fuelled by the recent feeding frenzy around AI and robotics, but also showing that HRI is maturing and that applications are now becoming market ready.

We couldn’t resist shooting a band cover at the Chicago waterfront, from left to right Fotios Papadopoulos, Tony Belpaeme, Charlotte Edmunds, Christopher Wallbridge, Emmanuel Senft, Maddy Bartlett, Bahar Irfan, Mina Marmpena (Daniel Hernandez and Serge Thill not showing).