Welcome to the Human-Robot Interaction Research team at the University of Melbourne.

Our mission is to create autonomous robots that act smoothly and safely with humans. We focus on key areas such as behavioural analytics, co-learning environments for humans and robots, and the personalization and adaptation of autonomous robots to enhance their performance in human interactions.

We are at the leading edge of human-robot interaction research, addressing challenges such as safe drone navigation in crowded spaces, personalized learning solutions with assistive robots, and visualizing uncertainty in high-stake scenarios involving robots…

Previous Next

Selected Recent Publications

  1. From Conversation to Orchestration: HCI Challenges and Opportunities in Interactive Multi-Agentic Systems
    Schömbs, Sarah, Zhang, Yan, Goncalves, Jorge, and Johal, Wafa
    In 13th International Conference of Human Agent Interaction (HAI’25) 2025
  2. “I can feel the risks by looking at the robot face”: Communicating Risk through a Physical Agent
    Schömbs, Sarah, Goncalves, Jorge, and Johal, Wafa
    In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25) Jul 2025
    Bib PDF 
    @inproceedings{schombs2025dis,
  bibtex_show = {true},
  author = {Sch{\"o}mbs, Sarah and Goncalves, Jorge and Johal, Wafa},
  title = {``I can feel the risks by looking at the robot face'':  Communicating  Risk  through a Physical Agent},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25)},
  year = {2025},
  month = jul,
  dates = {4--9},
  location = {Madeira, Portugal},
  acmdoi = {10.1145/3715336.3735759},
  acmisbn = {979-8-4007-1485-6/2025/07},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pdf = {https://chri-lab.github.io/files/papers/schombs2025dis.pdf},
  selected = {yes},
  project = {robotvis}
}
  3. Can you pass that tool?: Implications of indirect speech in physical human-robot collaboration
    Zhang, Yan, Ratnayake, Tharaka Sachintha, Sew, Cherie, Knibbe, Jarrod, Goncalves, Jorge, and Johal, Wafa
    In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25) Jul 2025
  4. Mr.LfD: A Mixed Reality Interface for Robot Learning from Demonstration
    Chen, Jiahao, Chacon, Antony, Bilal, Muhammad, Zhou, Qiushi, and Johal, Wafa
    In Proceedings of the 36th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI ’24), November 30–December 4, 2024, Brisbane, Australia Jul 2024
    Video PDF
  5. Illusion Spaces in VR: The Interplay Between Size and Taper Angle Perception in Grasping
    Zhang, Jian, Knibbe, Jarrod, and Johal, Wafa
    In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25) Jul 2025
    Bib PDF 
    @inproceedings{jian2025,
  bibtex_show = {true},
  author = {Zhang, Jian and Knibbe, Jarrod and Johal, Wafa},
  title = {Illusion Spaces in VR: The Interplay Between Size and Taper Angle Perception in Grasping},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25)},
  year = {2025},
  location = {Yokohama, Japan},
  acmdoi = {10.1145/3706598.3714162},
  acmisbn = {979-8-4007-1394-1/25/04},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pdf = {https://chri-lab.github.io/files/papers/jian2025.pdf},
  selected = {yes}
}

News

Dec 09, 2025
Congratulations to A/Prof. Wafa Johal on receiving the School of CIS 2025 Excellence in Research Award.

Dec 02, 2025
Congratulations to A/Prof. Wafa Johal on receiving funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence.

Dec 02, 2025
Congratulations to Muhammad and co-authors on having their paper Investigating the Impact of Robot Degree of Redundancy on Learning from Demonstration accepted to HRI 2026.

Nov 28, 2025
Audrey's last YoCHI. Farewell, Audrey.

Nov 21, 2025
Muhammad and Ramtin demonstrated Franka and Tiago at CIS.

Nov 14, 2025
Congratulations to Haoqi Li on completing his Master's degree and graduating.

Nov 12, 2025
Yan presented at HAI 2025, sharing the paper From Conversation to Orchestration: HCI Challenges and Opportunities in Interactive Multi-Agentic Systems on behalf of co-authors Sarah Schömbs, Jorge Goncalves, and Wafa Johal. [Read more]

Nov 05, 2025
Farshad successfully passed his PhD confirmation.

Oct 31, 2025
When multi-agentic systems meet robots! During the launch event on Friday, we were finally able to share a really cool project. We collaborated with the National Communication Museum and are now exhibiting our project, A Robot of Many Minds 🤖 🧠 , over the coming weeks as part of FRIEND, an exhibition about the relationship between humans and machines. Shoutout to the incredible #team Alex Wang, Sarah Schömbs, Yan Zhang and of course Wafa Johal.

... see all News