University of Massachusetts Lowell
Study tasks are the foundation of behavioral and design research in Human-Robot Interaction. Despite their importance, tasks are scattered across the literature, which leaves researchers repeatedly recreating or modifying paradigms that already exist.
We are building a public, searchable repository of HRI study tasks drawn from the academic literature. Researchers will be able to filter tasks by attributes like robot platform, control method, task type, participant configuration, role of embodiment, and more. We hope this makes it easier for researchers designing new studies to find, adapt, and build on tasks from prior work.
Our work so far: we reviewed 434 ACM/IEEE HRI papers from 2020–2025, fully annotating 155 in-person, non-observational studies with well-defined tasks. We are currently re-coding that dataset (this time, including remote studies) with an expanded code book and building the public-facing repository site. After that, we'll expand our review to include a broader set of papers.
We'll post a link to our HRI Late Breaking report here once it's published.
We'll be presenting a Late-Breaking Report poster at HRI '26 in Edinburgh, Scotland (March 16–19, 2026). Come find us and say hello!
Please share your feedback and suggestions using the form linked above. You can also contact Sam at sam_reig@uml.edu.