Shaping our hybrid future with robots together
04-09-2025
‘Out and about in your own country’: the IEEE RO-MAN 2025 conference took place this summer in Eindhoven: the high-tech capital of Europe. Participants travelled to the Netherlands for this international gathering where researchers, designers and practitioners exchanged their ideas, findings and prototypes relating to human-robot interaction.
You should have been there!
The 25th edition was special for several reasons: for the first time in 34 years, the conference took place in the Netherlands, and the number of participants had never been higher: more than 670 registrations from 39 different countries!
Team Digital Life
The AUAS research group Digital Life (Faculty of Digital Media & Creative Industry) was involved in the organisation. Lecturer Somaya Ben Allouch served as Programme Chair Europe and programme manager Monique Schaule Jullens acted as moderator for several parallel workshop sessions.
Using social robots for the elderly and children
In addition, colleague Marianne Bossema, lecturer-researcher at Digital Life, gave a presentation at the conference. She presented her publication “LLM-enhanced Interactions in Human-robot Collaborative Drawing with Older Adults”. This article reports on exploratory, participatory research into the course “Drawing with robots” for older people, which took place in 2024. The course involved collaboration with artists, art teachers and participants to investigate how a robot can support human creativity.
Simone de Droog, associate professor at Digital Life, also took to the stage to share the initial results of the Dream Robot project. Together with Amke Klompmaker, she demonstrated how they combine social robot technology and medical hypnosis to support children during medical procedures.
Meanwhile, the first studies for this project were conducted in a number of hospitals last summer. This phase is expected to be completed by the end of September. Based on the initial insights, the robot is already being modified: think of a more appealing voice, more animation and humour, and improved scripts and procedures to better suit children and healthcare practice.
Finally, PhD candidate Anne Marleen Olthof gave a presentation on Friday about her paper “Attuned Design Practice: Embodied Attunement in the context of HCI, HRI & XAI”, providing a valuable conclusion to this five-day conference.
All in all, it was a wonderful experience to attend the RO-MAN event with a large part of the Digital Life team and to become acquainted with the many interesting visions and research projects in the field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI).
Next year, we will be travelling to Japan!