Robohub.org
 

Henny Admoni: Understanding Human Behavior for Robotic Assistance and Collaboration | CMU RI Seminar


by
01 May 2019



share this:

Link to video on YouTube

“Human-robot collaboration has the potential to transform the way people work and live. Researchers are currently developing robots that assist people in public spaces, on the job, and in their homes. To be effective assistants, these robots must be able to recognize aspects of their human partners such as what their goals are, what their next action will be, and when they need help—in short, their task-relevant mental states. A large part of communication about mental states occurs nonverbally, through eye gaze, gestures, and other behaviors that provide implicit information. Therefore, to be effective collaborators, robots must understand nonverbal human communication as well as generate sufficiently expressive nonverbal behaviors that are understandable by their human partners. Developing effective human-robot interactions requires a multidisciplinary approach that involves fundamental robotics algorithms, insights from human psychology, and techniques from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. In this talk, I will describe my work on robots that collaborate with and assist humans on complex tasks, such as eating a meal. I will show how robots can guide human action using nonverbal behaviors, and how natural, intuitive human behaviors can reveal human mental states that robots must respond to. Throughout the talk, I will describe how techniques and knowledge from cognitive science help us develop robot algorithms that lead to more effective interactions between people and their robot partners.”




John Payne

            AUAI is supported by:



Subscribe to Robohub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

Exploring the Moon will require rovers that can think for themselves – an upcoming NASA mission will test whether they can

  04 Sep 2026
NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon to autonomously compute how to best explore a patch of ground.

Surviving the paper deluge: Notes from an ICRA panel on publishing, LLMs, and the future of peer review

Experts discuss peer-review challenges and possibilities for reshaping the process.

When expressive humanoid robots are awkward, people become wary – new brain study

  31 Aug 2026
People become more suspicious of a humanoid robot that makes errors, especially when the robot is an expressive conversation partner.

First 11 vs 11 humanoid soccer game played at RoboCup 2026

  28 Aug 2026
Watch highlights from this historic match.

How green is your robot? And other awkward questions

Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure. But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint.

These tiny drones are powered by sound

  24 Aug 2026
EPFL engineers have designed acoustic cavities that convert sound waves into thrust, propelling small robots and ultralight aerial vehicles without on-board actuators or electronics.

#AAMAS2026 blue sky award winner: Foundation world models for agents in changing environments

and   21 Aug 2026
Hear from the AAMAS 2026 Best Blue Sky Paper Award winner.

Robotics roadmaps from around the world spotlight of the month: Japan

Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s



AUAI is supported by:







Subscribe to Robohub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence