HRCM 2025: Human-Robot Contact and Manipulation

Date:	Saturday, 21th June 2025
Time:	8:45 AM – 12:30 PM (half-day)
Location:	TBA

Description

The Workshop on Human-Robot Contact and Manipulation (HRCM 2025) at RSS 2025 aims to to unite expertise across control theory, shared autonomy, physical modeling, and human understanding to have robots operate in direct or indirect physical contact with people. The workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

Compliant and/or soft robot hardware design
Compliant control and physical safety
Collaborative manipulation and shared control
Contact modeling and simulation for rigid and soft bodies
Tactile sensing and haptic interfaces
Planning, control, and/or learning in contact-rich environments
Applications involving direct human-robot contact, such as:
- Assisted Activities for Daily Living (ADLs), e.g., feeding, bathing, walking
- Exoskeletons and active prostheses
- Medicine, e.g., patient transfer and surgery
Benchmarks and metrics for HRCM applications

Workshop Format

In addition to a poster session and invited speakers, this workshop will include a breakout discussion where participants will split into groups of ~5 to cover the following themes:

Contact-Rich Modeling and Compliant Control

Enabling the safe operation of robots in direct contact with their environment or other agents by (1) developing algorithms and hardware for planning and control and (2) developing and using rigid, deformable, and soft-body contact models and simulations, sim-to-real transfer, and tactile sensing.
Breakout Discussion Topic: Create a wish list of models, simulations, datasets, algorithms, etc. that will yield improvements (e.g. more robust, more tractable) in the compliant and contact-rich control settings.

pHRI Applications

Discussing all human-centric use cases of the themes in Session 1, such as human augmentation, rehabilitation, and medical devices.
Breakout Discussion Topic: With consideration of the pHRI applications discussed, what standardized benchmarks and metrics can be used to measure the success of the algorithms, hardware, models, and simulations etc. from the previous theme?

Call for Contributions

Extended Abstracts

Submission: We invite authors to submit extended abstracts for posters (2-page + references, RSS Latex or Word template, abstract section optional/not required). We welcome extended abstracts that describe recent results, preliminary work, or position papers related to the workshop themes. Work that has been submitted to/is under consideration at other venues is also welcome.

All submissions will go through a single-blind review process, and reviews will be conducted by at least two members from the list of workshop organizers and invited speakers. All contributions must be submitted as single PDF document at this Google Forms link.

Presentation: Accepted submissions will be allotted a brief (1-2 min) lightning talk to advertise their poster, as well as presentation at a 30-min poster session.

For any enquiries, please contact: hrcm-organizers@googlegroups.com

Extended Abstract Submission Deadline	May 27, 2025 (23:59 AoE)
Notification to Authors	by June 3, 2025
Workshop Day	June 21, 2025

Schedule (Saturday 21 June 2025)

Time in PDT	Start Time in UTC* (your time zone)	Item
8:45am - 8:55am	21 June 2025 08:45:00 PDT	Opening & Introductions
8:55am - 9:15am	21 June 2025 08:55:00 PDT	Talk: Sylvain Calinon Talk Title (TBD)
9:15am - 9:35am	21 June 2025 09:15:00 PDT	Talk: Wanxin Jin Talk Title (TBD)
9:35am - 9:55am	21 June 2025 09:35:00 PDT	Talk: Luka Peternel Talk Title (TBD)
9:55am - 10:15am	21 June 2025 09:55:00 PDT	Talk: Tania Morimoto Talk Title (TBD)
10:15am - 10:30am	21 June 2025 10:15:00 PDT	Poster Lightning Talks
10:30am - 11:00am	21 June 2025 10:30:00 PDT	Coffee Break + Poster Session
11:00am - 11:20am	21 June 2025 11:00:00 PDT	Talk: Laurel Riek Talk Title (TBD)
11:20am - 11:40am	21 June 2025 11:20:00 PDT	Talk: Vy Nguyen Talk Title (TBD)
11:40am - 12:10pm	21 June 2025 11:40:00 PDT	Breakout Discussion
12:10pm - 12:30pm	21 June 2025 12:10:00 PDT	Roundtable / Conclusion

* This time is calculated to be in your computer's reported time zone.
For example, those in Los Angeles may see UTC-7,
while those in Berlin may see UTC+2.

Please note that there may be differences to your actual time zone.

Invited Speakers

Speaker	Affiliation	Topic
Sylvain Calinon †	Idiap Research Institute	Human-Centered Applications and Optimal Control
Wanxin Jin	Arizona State University	Contact-Rich Manipulation and Control
Tania Morimoto	UC San Diego	Soft Robotics and Haptics
Vy Nguyen	Hello Robot	Assistive Robotics Applications
Luka Peternel †	Delft University of Technology	Physical Human-Robot Collaboration, Tele-impedance and Robotic Physiotherapy
Laurel Riek	UC San Diego	Healthcare Robotics and Shared Control