Human-Robot Interaction

Human-robot interaction examines how people and robots understand one another and coordinate in settings such as collaborative work, social navigation, healthcare, and the home. Researchers combine multimodal perception and language models with shared-control policies, adaptive planning, haptics, and interfaces such as augmented reality; they study these systems through user experiments, field deployments, and benchmarks for tasks like handover and social navigation. The field also draws on design research and qualitative methods to understand trust, accessibility, privacy, agency, and how interactions affect different people and groups. A central challenge is translating strong task performance in controlled tests into safe, reliable, and socially appropriate behavior in real-world settings without increasing workload or reducing human control.