The Robot Design Competition
For the 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2025, we are inviting submissions to the Robot Design Competition. The competition has three primary goals:
To provide researchers and students with a hands-on experience in HRI design through a team-based project.
To engage teams of diverse backgrounds working in engineering, computer science, art/design, and social sciences.
To provide teams with a platform to demonstrate their creativity and vision for future HRI.
The Design Challenge and Context
Building upon this year’s conference theme of shaping our hybrid future with robots together, participating teams will develop interactive robotic objects that show how robots can partner with humans, contribute their unique abilities, socially integrate with individuals or into groups, and/or support human needs. We encourage participants to identify and focus on a particular interaction context, develop their interactive robotic objects, and create scenarios that illustrate how their robots fit within the lives of the humans involved.
Interactive Robotic Objects: These are automatically operated mechanisms that share, support, and/or enhance human activity. Their design is not limited, and teams can create new robots including soft robots from scratch, build upon everyday objects or robots from their homes or labs or prior projects, or hack off-the-shelf robots. We encourage the use of open-source code and homemade components, but commercial tools with valid personal use licenses are fine. Don’t feel limited by any of these suggestions: be creative! The competition does not focus on demonstrations of technical proficiency; rather it emphasizes the design of compelling interactions that inspire, surprise, and delight.
Design: We recommend that participants consider the following design questions:
In what setting(s) will the robot exist? We suggest a real-world context familiar to your team, to keep the scope manageable, but any is fine. Example settings include the home, office, university, city park, commuter train, car, and so on.
Who are the stakeholders who live, work, study, travel, or relax in that setting?
What activities do these stakeholders engage in within your chosen setting(s)? Do they sit or walk or drive,
Activities might include working, commuting, exercising, visiting a doctor, sightseeing, or having a meal.
How will the robot contribute to and partner in the activities these people engage in, and what urgent need(s) will it fill?
Process: We encourage participants to focus their design process on the human aspect, and recommend that teams analyze and consider human needs, explore ways to sense human states and responses, include features to communicate or interact with these needs and states, and showcase these interactions in real-life settings. We encourage you to tell a creative story for each project, with humans in the center.
Competition: Teams will show their interactive robotic objects: 1) as a demonstration during the Robot Design Competition session at the conference, and 2) in a poster displayed for the duration of the conference. Winners will be announced at the end of the conference during the closing ceremony. A jury of RO-MAN community luminaries will select winners based on their merits along several aspects:
Technical Design: Includes, for example, hand or digital sketches, physical prototypes, and/or showcase videos of robotic functions and/or features.
Context Design: Includes, for example, motivation for the interaction, user/community investigation, understanding of needs, goals of the human-robot partnership or collaboration, and any user testing and feedback.
Demonstration: The best presentation at the conference venue that both engages attendees and demonstrates the project’s technical design, context design, and/or its real-time human-robot interaction.
The jury will select the top teams with the most outstanding contributions in each of these three areas. The top team in each area will be awarded the Best Technical Design, Best Context Design, and Best Demonstration prize.
Important Dates
26 June 2025: Submission deadline of 11:59pm, Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
3 July 2025: Acceptance notifications.
10 July 2025: Final versions due.
25–29 August 2025: The RO-MAN 2025 conference. The competition will happen at the conference venue. Winners will be announced during the conference’s award ceremony.
Competition Guidelines
Procedure: Teams should design, build, and document their projects during the timeframe before the RO-MAN 2025 conference. We encourage teams to photograph and video record their design and development process, to include as learnings during final presentations.
Participants: We invite students, researchers, educators, and industry practitioners from all stages of their university or professional careers, as well as any disciplinary focus area. While not required, we encourage multidisciplinary, even international, team membership.
Team Size: In case of team participation, we suggest no more than 5 members. If your team has reason to exceed this number, please check with the Chairs first.
Registration: Registration for the competition itself is free, although at least 1 member of each team must register for, and attend, the RO-MAN 2025 conference.
Submissions: There is no limit to the number of entries per university or organization. We encourage each participant to focus on a single team entry, although participants are permitted to join multiple teams.
Jury and Judging: A jury composed of experts in design, robotics, and interaction will assess each entry during a judging session held at the conference. The jury’s evaluations will determine the winners in the three categories of the competition.
Submissions and Presentations
Initial Submissions: Robot Design Competition participants should prepare an initial submission and email it to competition@ro-man2025.org by the deadline date of 26 June 2025. Creating and emailing an initial submission is how teams enter the competition and indicate that they’re working on a project.
Each team’s initial submission should be a 2–4 page pictorial, following the call, that includes:
Project title and authors (names, affiliations, and email addresses).
An abstract of 150 words or fewer
A brief description should include but not limited to design context, the human involved, the scenarios, and the activities. Descriptions of both the technical and behavioral aspects are encouraged so that the Chairs can better evaluate the project.
One or more visualizations of the interactive robotic object. The image can be in the format of photographs, CAD models, hand-drawn sketches, digital images, or even AI-generated images (with proper attribution).
Presentations: We expect that the Robot Design Competition session will coincide with the conference poster session, but we will announce details later. During the session, teams will present (show and tell) their interactive everyday objects to the competition jury and conference attendees as they pass by.
At the conference, each participant or team should present:
Either (a) the interactive everyday object itself to demonstrate in person, or (b) a video that shows the project in context and in action, interacting with people. We strongly encourage teams to bring and show their interactive everyday objects in person, as the most informative and entertaining representation of their work. We understand that some projects may be too large or delicate to travel well, and ask teams in this situation to focus their videos on demonstrating interactions.
A poster (we’ll determine specifications shortly) that includes the project title, authors and affiliations, description of the design concept, images showing the interactive everyday object within an interaction context, and other background that the team feels is relevant to communicate their efforts. We encourage teams to build upon the content included in their initial proposals and final designs.
Five or more images (renderings or photographs) that show the project in various stages of design development. The first should include the original, unmodified state of the purchased or found object, and the last should show its final, interactive form. The idea is to communicate the team’s design process, including (highlighting!) failures, learnings, and successes along the way. While most conference venues emphasize completed works, we celebrate the design process itself.
Jury and Awards
The RO-MAN community is very diverse, including researchers and practitioners from engineering, computer science, art/design, and social sciences, and the goal of the competition is to recognize outstanding contributions from a combination of these disciplines. There will be one award in each of the three (Technical, Context, and Demonstration) areas.
Contact Us
The RO-MAN 2025 Robot Design Competition Chairs are:
Sonya S. Kwak, Korean Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea
Amy Winters, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
David Sirkin, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA
Email: competition@ro-man2025.org