While autonomous robots excel at repetitive tasks in controlled environments, the world in which most humans live is messy, constantly changing, and filled with other people. Important opportunities exist for helping humans in these unstructured environments, particularly as our population ages, but new approaches are needed for robots to be as successful inside homes, clinics, and hospitals as they already are in factories. We are thus working to discover whether and how physical human-robot interaction can benefit humans by designing, building, and evaluating new systems targeted at particular user populations.
We are interested in robots that physically interact with both objects and people to accomplish useful tasks, taking advantage of novel strategies to detect and understand contact. Many physical interactions that transpire between humans, such as object handovers and hugs, have strong social dynamics that have been carefully studied. Robots that skillfully take part in such interactions may be able to work more effectively with and around humans. We are interested in how such robots should behave, and how people react to them in different scenarios.
Social-physical human-robot interaction (spHRI) may have a special role to play in clinical and therapeutic settings, where patients need to perform repetitive physical activities to improve their skills. We envision robots that function as an exercise partner or coach, interacting with the user both physically and socially in a natural and engaging manner. We are also creating algorithms that enable a human to teach a robot new manual tasks, which is again a task that has both physical and social aspects.
