Eli Lilly and Purdue to share human-robot interaction field findings at RoboBusiness 2026

Human-robot interaction remains one of the most consequential unsolved problems in industrial automation — and one of the least studied under real conditions. At RoboBusiness 2026, a robotics engineer from Eli Lilly and a professor from Purdue University will present what they learned by taking HRI research out of the lab and onto a live production floor.

Faraz Yousuf, a senior principal robotics application engineer at Eli Lilly, and Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski, an assistant professor at Purdue University, will deliver a talk titled "Human-Robot Interaction: Bridging Academia and Industry" at 11:45 a.m. PT on the first day of the show.

Why field studies are rare

The core problem, as the session frames it:

"Human-robot interaction is one of the biggest unlocks left in industrial automation to enable stronger safety, but most HRI research happens on university campuses that produces data that rarely survives contact with a live production floor."

"Running studies inside a working manufacturing site is logistically hard enough that most academia–industry partnerships never get past the first meeting."

Yousuf and Ostrowski's partnership is an exception to that pattern — and the session is built around explaining how they made it work.

What the session covers

The pair will share learnings from HRI field studies conducted with manufacturing and warehouse operators working around live automated guided vehicles (AGVs). The discussion will include early findings about people's perception of robots on the manufacturing floor — the kind of data that campus-based studies rarely capture.

Beyond the findings themselves, the speakers will present the playbook they built to make the academia–industry partnership repeatable. For engineers who have watched collaboration attempts stall at the kickoff meeting, that operational framework may be as valuable as the research results.

The speakers

Yousuf works at the intersection of human-robot interaction, robot safety, inspection robotics, and system integration in pharmaceutical manufacturing environments at Eli Lilly. His experience spans designing, deploying, integrating, and supporting ASRSes, AGVs, AMRs, and inspection quadrupeds.

Ostrowski is an assistant professor in the School of Applied and Creative Computing with a courtesy appointment in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. She specializes in co-design and participatory design approaches for robots and AI in industrial, manufacturing, and home contexts. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group. She received her Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from MIT and her bachelor's and master's degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan.

Event details

RoboBusiness 2026, the leading event for commercial robotics developers, takes place October 20 and 21 in Santa Clara, Calif. Attendees can gain insights from experts in robotics and AI on cutting-edge research, industry trends, and innovative applications. The event also features networking opportunities for attendees to connect with industry experts.