Eli Lilly, Purdue to share field learnings on human robot interaction at RoboBusiness

What happened

Eli Lilly, Purdue to share field learnings on human robot interaction at RoboBusiness, according to The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/lilly-physical-ai.mp4 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.

At RoboBusiness 2026, Faraz Yousuf, a senior principal robotics application engineer at Eli Lilly, and Dr. The two will share what they learned running HRI field studies with manufacturing and warehouse operators around live automated guided vehicles ( AGVs ). They will also explain some early findings about people’s perception of robots on the manufacturing floor and the playbook they built to make the partnership repeatable.