Human-Robot Interaction

About

Robots are increasingly present in everyday environments, where they must interpret human actions, communicate intentions, and support shared tasks. Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) examines how such collaboration works in practice and how people understand and respond to robot behaviour.

This course provides an introductory and hands-on view of HRI. We begin by introducing core concepts, including common interaction goals, task types and embodiments, and how interaction unfolds through sensing and action. Students will work with an open-source robotic platform – the SO-101 arm via LeRobot – an open library from Hugging Face for robot control, demonstration collection and behaviour building, as well as the Reachy Mini, a compact robot designed for expressive movement and social interaction.

This intensive course runs for two weeks, and includes lectures, discussions and preparation for implementation in the morning, plus independent work in the afternoon. The morning sessions end with time for practical questions. The instructor will be present in the afternoon to assist with coding

Target group

The course is suitable for bachelor's and master's students, as well as for anyone who is interested in working on their own robotic projects using open-source platforms.

Since the course includes a lot of hands-on implementation, basic Python programming skills are necessary.

Participants must have completed a high school or vocational degree or equivalent by the time the course starts. However, they do not have to be a degree student at a university to participate in our courses.

Additionally, all summer school course students must be 18 years or older, as it is the legal age in Finland

Course aim

After completing the course, students will be able to:

Must know

Define common HRI terms (e.g., interaction, embodiment, communication modality) and list an example of each.

Classify at least two different robot task types (e.g., manipulation, navigation) and explain their relevance to HRI.

Describe the core capabilities and limitations of SO-101 + LeRobot and Reachy Mini and demonstrate basic use in simulation.

Formulate an HRI problem aligned with their interests and outline a corresponding study approach (1–2 paragraphs).

Implement, using provided building blocks, a simple robot behaviour in simulation and submit a short report summarising observations.

Need to know

Deploy and run their prototype on physical hardware and document at least two concrete differences between simulated and real execution.

Present their project (goal, design, implementation, observations) in a short oral or poster-style presentation.

Nice to know

Conduct a small informal user test (e.g., 1–3 peers) and summarise participant responses in written or visual form.

Reflect on project outcomes and propose at least one design improvement based on observations

Fee info