Robotics

RESEARCH

As a social roboticist, my primary interest is in how robots are perceived as social agents, what we can do to influence that perception, and the broader implications of creating new, artificial members of society.

My research until now has used navigation as our means of exploring this topic, particularly around doorways, as it presents a discrete social situation with clear roles and responsibilities. Recognition of a right-of-way is a fundamental part of being a mutually-recognized part of society, and developing robots that can participate in these behaviours (and trigger reciprocation in others) is a concrete step on the way to building fully-fledged social agents.

This work has required real robotics development, not merely “Wizard of Oz” style teleoperation. While working for the autonomy lab, the Assertive Behaviour project involved writing real code that could agnostically handle both fellow robots and humans trying to pass through doorways. This commitment to real robot development enhances the findings of a user study by testing systems that might actually be deployed on an autonomous robot one day, rather than being purely speculative.

For more, see my published research papers under the “Publications” tab above.

WORK SAMPLES

My public code repositories may be found on github:

• GitHub