Most human-robot interaction (HRI) research is done in university labs, and the data it produces rarely holds up on a working production line. At RoboBusiness 2026 in Santa Clara, California, pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly and Purdue University will present work that went the other way: their studies ran on a real manufacturing floor, with real workers and robots that were actually in service.
The session is titled “Human-Robot Interaction: Bridging Academia and Industry” and is scheduled for 11:45 a.m. PT on October 20, the first day of the show. It was announced by The Robot Report on October 2, 2026.
What the talk covers
The two speakers will describe HRI field studies they ran with manufacturing and warehouse operators who work around live automated guided vehicles (AGVs). Few industrial robots are as common as an AGV, and few are so likely to share space with people. These carts drive through aisles, cross walkways and pull up to workstations where staff are busy. How workers see these machines affects safety, trust and in the end whether a deployment pays off.
The session will cover three areas:
- practical lessons from running HRI studies in a live production environment rather than a campus lab;
- early findings on how people perceive robots on the manufacturing floor;
- the playbook the partners built so that an industry-academia collaboration like this can be repeated.
The third point may matter most to other companies. Pharma plants are tightly regulated, and getting researchers onto the floor involves access, safety and scheduling problems that most academic projects never have to deal with. A partnership framework that others can reuse could help more HRI work move off campus.
Who is speaking
Faraz Yousuf is a senior principal robotics application engineer at Eli Lilly. His work covers human-robot interaction, robot safety, inspection robotics and system integration in pharmaceutical manufacturing. He also contributes to industrial robot safety standards, including ANSI R15.08 Part 3, ISO 25785-1 and TR R15.108, so the factory-floor findings come with a standards perspective too.
Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski is an assistant professor in Purdue University’s School of Applied and Creative Computing, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Mechanical Engineering. Her research centers on co-design and participatory design of robots and AI in industrial and manufacturing settings. In this approach, the people who will work alongside a robot help shape it. Before Purdue, she did postdoctoral research at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT Media Lab.
About the show
RoboBusiness 2026 runs October 20-21, 2026 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It is organized by The Robot Report and its parent company Arrowfly, with MassRobotics as strategic partner, and marks the event’s 20th anniversary. The program is split into five tracks: physical AI, enabling technologies, humanoids, field robotics, and business/deployment. More than 100 exhibitors are expected, along with a Startup Alley and an Engineering Theater on the show floor. Featured speakers include Rodney Brooks of Robust AI, Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley and Jonathan Hurst of Agility Robotics.
Humanoids and physical AI get most of the attention in robotics right now. The Lilly–Purdue session deals with a more basic question: what people who work next to robots every day actually think of them, and how to measure that reliably outside the lab.
