We are excited to announce the preliminary programme for the 14th annual We Robot Conference to be held on April 24 and 25, 2026, with a pre-conference workshop on April 23, 2026. The final conference programme will be available on March 19, 2026, following the final paper submission deadline. Click here to get your ticket.
Pre-Conference Workshop – 23rd April 2026 (Thursday)
09.00-11.30 | Morning session: Diving into the future at the House of Robotics, where cutting-edge research is rewriting what machines can do.
Location: House of Robotics
13.00-17.30 | Afternoon session: Get ready to roll up your sleeves! Workshop activities will dive deep into the conference’s themes (agentic AI, robot ethics, and beyond) before crowning the ultimate robot knowledge champion in a fierce Robot Trivia face-off.
Location (Afternoon session): Wikimedia Deutschland
Main Conference – 24th and 25th April 2026 (Friday & Saturday)
Location: bUm – Place for Solidarity
Across two enriching days, the conference programme is structured around individual paper presentations and panel discussions, designed to facilitate meaningful dialogue and foster engagement across disciplinary boundaries. And because the best conversations don’t always happen in the conference room, join us for the conference dinner on the 24th where the energy, ideas, and good company keep flowing long into the evening.
1 Day – 24th April 2026
09:00-09:30 | Welcome
09:30-10:30 | Paper Session
- Reimagining the Three Laws of Robots: Ethical Principles from Field Deployment for Adaptive Governance
Authors: Tomomi Ota (Shiga University) and Rikiya Yamamoto (Robot Friendly Project)
10:30-11:00 | Break
11:00-13:00 | Panel: Building Systems That Last: Law, Technology, and Long-Term Thinking
- The Charge of Green Robots: From Environmental Robot Ethics to an Environmental Rule of Law for Robotics
Authors: Jacopo Ciani, Ugo Pagallo, Massimo Durante and Ludovica Paseri (Department of Law, University of Turin) - When Right to Repair Meets AI: Reinterpreting the Right to Repair through Individuation
Author: Ryota Akasaka (The University of Osaka) - Robotic Imposters with Human Helpers: An anthropologically informed study of sociotechnical imaginaries around social robots in staged and unstaged settings in Japan
Authors: Elsa Concas (Stockholm University), Laetitia Tanqueray (Department of Technology and Society, Lund University) and Stefan Larsson (Department of Technology and Society, Lund University)
13:00-14:00 | Lunch
14:00-15:00 | Paper Session
- From Limited Risk to Prohibited Use: Mapping the EU AI Act’s Risk Framework onto Robotic Public Safety Systems.
Author: Irmak Erdogan (KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law))
15:00-15:30 | Break
15:30-17:30 | Panel: Reimagining Accountability: Who Answers When Systems Fail?
- Intention, But Hybrid: A New Test for Posthuman Agents
Author: Janko Munjić (Appellate Court in Kragujevac; Faculty of Law, University of Kragujevac - AI Risk Bonds: A Market-Based Mechanism for Governing Liability
Authors: Gleb Papyshev (Lingnan University), Sara Migliorini (University of Macau) and Keith Jin Deng Chan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) - Curated Information Frameworks: Contextual Transparency and Governance for Dynamic AI
Author: Emily LaRosa (Michigan State University)
2 Day – 25th April 2026
09:30-10:30 | Paper Session
- Rethinking Robot Ownership: Comparing Public, Corporate, and Private Ownership Models.
Authors: Isaac Sheidlower, Tomo Lazovich, Harini Suresh, and Serena Booth (Brown University)
10:30-11:00 | Break
11:00-13:00 | Panel: AI Safety and assurance: Technological foundations, standards and audits
- Protocols as Custom: A Case for Negligence in Agentic Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Veronica Paternolli (University of Verona) and Ryan Calo (University of Washington) - Revealing AI’s Latent Rulebook
Authors: David Atkinson (Georgetown) and Paul Ohm (Georgetown Law) - A Scoping Review of System Integration Audits: Towards a New Class of Artificial Intelligence Evaluation
Authors: Leah Davis (McGill University), Ajung Moon (McGill University) and Dominic Martin (Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM))
13:00-14:00 | Lunch
14:00-15:00 | Paper Session
- From Rejection to Regulation: Mapping the Landscape of AI Resistance
Authors: Ayse Gizem Yasar (École normale supérieure Paris) and Can Simsek (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society)
15:00-15:30 | Break
15:30-17:30 | Panel: Deep Fakes and Deeper Problems: AI’s Problem with Nuances
- Ambiguity Collapse & LLMs
Author: Shira Gur-Arieh (Harvard Law School) - How Much Is My Voice Worth to an Algorithm? Synthetic Voices, Embodied Agents, and the Right to Freedom from Vocal Identity Confusion
Author: Maddalena Castellani (Attorney-at-law and Independent Researcher)
