Designing Transparent and Understandable Robots (D-TUR)

Workshop at HRI '26, March 16, 2026, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

As robots become increasingly autonomous and integrated into everyday human environments, understanding how and why they behave as they do is critical for establishing trust, safety, and effective collaboration. The Designing Transparent and Understandable Robots (D-TUR) workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in improving robot understandability across physical and social contexts of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI).

The workshop will explore design, perception, and evaluation of transparency and understandability in robots—bridging insights from cognitive science, social robotics, machine learning, and human–computer interaction. We encourage participation from both academia and industry, to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on creating robots that communicate intent, uncertainty, and reasoning processes in ways that are intuitive to diverse users.

Main Topics of Interest:

Designing understandable robots through affordances
Designing legible robot behaviors
Transparency through XAI or mechanistic interpretability
Understanding robot failures, intents, and capabilities
Explanations in HRI
Metrics & evaluation methods for measuring understanding
Co-designing understandable robots with users
(Dis-)Advantages of making robots understandable
Personalization to improve understanding
Adapting the level of transparency based on context

Keynote Speakers

We are pleased to introduce our exteemed keynote speakers

Dr. Henny Admoni is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab. Her work focuses on enabling more intuitive human–robot collaboration by interpreting human behaviors such as eye gaze, gestures, and language. Through her research, Prof. Admoni aims to improve how robots understand and respond to people in real-world settings, especially in assistive and collaborative environments.

Dr. Alessandra Rossi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Naples “Federico II”. Her research lies at the intersection of human–robot interaction, explainable artificial intelligence, and social robotics. She investigates how adaptive explanations influence human trust in robots, with the goal of making robot behavior more understandable and relatable. Prof. Rossi is also active in international collaborations and scientific initiatives aimed at promoting transparency and ethical interaction in robotics.

Tentative Schedule

Date: March 16, 2026 (Half-day Workshop)

09:00 - 09:05	Welcome and introduction to the workshop
09:05 - 09:45	Keynote 1 and Q&A — Dr. Henny Admoni, Carnegie Mellon University: Shaping Interactions Through Theory of Mind Modeling
09:45 - 10:30	Paper presentations
10:30 - 10:50	Coffee break and networking
10:50 - 11:30	Keynote 2 and Q&A — Dr. Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples “Federico II”: TBD
11:30 - 12:15	Interactive break-out sessions
12:15 - 12:45	Discussing the break-out session results
12:45 - 13:00	Concluding remarks

The interactive break-out sessions will allow workshop participants to discuss their experiences and challenges with making robot behavior understandable in smaller groups. Questions will be provided to focus discussions on open problems. Example questions include:

"How can we use transparency to ensure that the integration of robots into people's lives does not disrupt their daily life?"
"Which transparency aspects are relevant to empower the general public and not just experts to use robots efficiently?"

Further questions will be based on the presented submissions to increase engagement. During the break-out sessions, the organizers of the workshop will actively participate and help guide the discussions when necessary. Online participants will have their own break-out room to make communication easier. We aim to encourage all participants to share their experiences and thoughts, allowing us to discuss open problems from various perspectives. Each group will be asked to summarize the main points of their discussions afterwards in a general discussion with all attendees.

Call for Papers

We invite short paper submissions (up to 6 pages) presenting original, ongoing, or position work on transparency, understandability, and explainability in human–robot interaction. Topics of interest include theoretical frameworks, experimental studies, design case studies, and applications related to understandability of robots in physical and social HRI.

Target Audience

The D-TUR workshop targets researchers, designers, and practitioners from fields such as Human–Robot Interaction, Explainable AI, Robotics, Cognitive Science, and Human–Computer Interaction. We particularly welcome contributions from interdisciplinary teams interested in both technical and human-centered perspectives on robot understandablity and transparency.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should be written in English and follow the general ACM SIG format ("sigconf", double column format). Manuscripts will undergo a double-blind review, authors should ensure that they anonymize their submissions according to the HRI Anonymization Guidelines. Submissions should be up to 6 pages (excluding references). Accepted papers will be presented as short talks, and will be included on the workshop website.

To accommodate authors aiming for the early-bird HRI registration deadline, we provide two submission tracks: an early track synchronized with the early-bird registration for HRI 2026 and a regular track with a later deadline.