Research Interests – Short

• Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
  • Non-verbal gesture and communication in physical human-robot interaction (implicit interaction), especially within the context of human-robot shared-task.
• Roboethics / Robot Ethics
  • Social and ethical implication of physical interaction between human and robot in a shared task environment
  • Deliberating democratically about ethics of robots / robotics

Research Interests – Long

Studies suggest that people feel more positively toward robots that work with people rather than those that replace them. This means that in order to create robots that can collaborate and share tasks with humans, human-human interaction dynamics must be understood – key components of which could be replicated in human-robot interaction.

My current research focuses on how simple a non-verbal gesture (like that of jerky hesitation motion of your hand when you and another person reach for the same last piece of chocolate at the same time) can be used to play a role in building a more human-friendly human-robot interaction.

These gestures seem to have communicative functionality, and affect the social hierarchy and/or relationship between the two agents involved in the interaction (i.e., who gets the chocolate in the end? who yields the chocolate and how does that affect your relationship with the other person?). It is these kinds of non-verbal gestures that I am interested in studying within the context of human and robot collaboratively working together in a shared workspace.