Call for Contributions | ICSR 2026 | Special Session on Cultural Robotics (ss01: Cultural Robotics)
Cultural Robotics examines how robots are shaped by, express, and transform cultures across art and performance, language and ritual, design and craft, ethics and governance, and every day socially interactive practices.
This special session invites full papers that advance the philosophy, theory, methods, design, and case studies on robots as cultural actors and artifacts. The invited speakers will explore the deep impact of social robots as cultural agents, as well as the impact of culture on the design, development, testing and integration of robotics, across a broad spectrum of disciplines.
List of Topics
Cultural-based Methods: Practice-based research, research-creation, ethnography, participatory/indigenous methods, curatorial methods, long-form field deployments.
Cultural Creativity - Art, Performance & Media: Robots on stage and in galleries; dramaturgies, choreographies, and scenographies for human–robot encounters; cultural computing.
Language & Semiotics: Multilingual interaction, narrative and storytelling, symbolism, humor, metaphor, idiom, and ritual in HRI.
Communities & Inclusion: Accessibility, disability perspectives, education, intergenerational and cross-cultural engagements; community labs and living-lab models.
Ethics, Policy & Governance: Cultural rights, heritage, consent, data stewardship, value tensions, and policy frameworks for culturally aware robots.
Design for Cultural Sustainability: Circular design, repair and reuse, regenerative lifecycles, local materials and craft, cultural heritage conservation with/through robots.
Tools, Platforms & Datasets: Open corpora and benchmarks capturing cultural variation; toolkits for culture-aware robot behavior; reproducible evaluation protocols.
Cultural Domains & Cases: Care, education, tourism, creative industries, public spaces, religious/ritual contexts, and civic/cultural institutions.
State-of-the-Art Syntheses: Systematic reviews, meta-reviews, and position papers articulating future research agendas in Cultural Robotics.
Emerging Topics: Exploratory or speculative areas not yet fully defined within Cultural Robotics, including unexpected applications, hybrid human–robot cultural forms, posthuman imaginaries, experimental technologies, and crossovers with adjacent fields (e.g., climate adaptation, blockchain, PNFTs, immersive arts, bio-robotics). This open category ensures that novel, boundary-pushing contributions not anticipated in the above themes are welcomed.
Background & Prior Publications (select references)
Samani, H., et al. Cultural Robotics: The Culture of Robotics and Robotics in Culture. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. 2013;10(12).
Initial conjecture on a concept for Cultural Robotics, built from the field of Cultural Computing.
Koh, J.T.K.V., et al. (Eds.) Cultural Robotics. LNAI 9549. Springer.
Originating from the 2015 workshop; early field-defining collection.
Dunstan, B.J., et al. (Ed.) Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and Their Emergent Cultural Ecologies. Springer Series on Cultural Computing, 2023.
Broadened scope across futures, assistive tech, and creative platforms.
Intended Audience
While Social Robotics has cautiously embraced multidisciplinarity within traditional research, Cultural Robotics fully opens the field—affirming the essential role of diverse perspectives in shaping robotics. It invites exploratory and speculative approaches to embodied technology, broadening the possibilities for human–robot interaction. If social robotics is multidisciplinary, cultural robotics is antidisciplinary: it rejects disciplinary silos and thrives on tangential connections.
The special track welcomes submissions from a highly international group of researchers, spanning the widest possible scope of cultural and disciplinary diversity, including but not limited to, engineers, designers, artists, researchers, educators, and professionals from related fields who are passionate about driving forward-thinking and responsible robotics innovations.
We encourage submissions from under-represented regions and communities. If you require accessibility accommodations for the session (e.g., alternative submission formats, captioned video loops, remote Q&A), contact the organizers before the camera-ready deadline.
Contributor Information
Authors interested in contributing to the Special Session on Cultural Robotics should follow the call for submission instructions found on the ICSR 2026 Website. Contributors intending to submit to the Special Session on Cultural Robotics (SS01) should indicate on the submission platform.
Accepted papers will be published in the ICSR 2026 Proceedings, indexed by Springer in its Lecture Notes for Artificial Intelligence series (LNAI). Authors should format their contributions according to the Springer LNAI format. Author guidelines can be found here.
All authors mush adhere to the Springer Nature Code of Conduct.
Important Links
ICSR 2026 Website
ICSR 2026 Call for Submissions
ICSR 2026 Special Sessions
Springer LNAI Guidelines and Templates
Springer METEOR Submission Portal (link to be updated)
(make sure to indicate your intention to submit to special session SS01: Cultural Robotics)
Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: 15 Feb 2026
Notification of Acceptance for Papers: 15 Apr 2026
Camera Ready Deadline: 15 May 2026
Conference: 1–4 July 2026
Contact Information
Should you have any questions, please reach out to culturebots@gmail.com.