Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Christoforos Mavrogiannis (University of Washington) - Building Robots that Humans Accept

Speaker: Christoforos Mavrogiannis, University of Washington

Talk Title: Building Robots that Humans Accept

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Robotics has transformed sectors like manufacturing and fulfillment which now rely on robots to meet their goals. Conventionally, these robots operate in isolation from humans due to safety and efficiency considerations. Lately, there have been efforts towards bringing robots closer to humans to assist in everyday-life tasks, enhance productivity, and augment human capabilities. Despite these efforts, robotic technology has not reached widespread acceptance outside of factories; robot autonomy is often not robust, producing new problems that outweigh its benefits for users. Inspired by theories of technology acceptance, my research strives to develop highly functional, safe, and comfortable robots that humans accept. In this talk, I argue that the path towards acceptance requires imbuing robots with a deeper understanding of how users perceive and react to them. To motivate this perspective, I will share insights on robot navigation in dynamic environments, a fundamental task with many crucial applications ranging from collaborative manufacturing to warehouse automation and healthcare. I will describe a human-inspired algorithmic framework for crowd navigation, highlighting how mathematical abstractions of multiagent behavior enable safe, efficient, and positively perceived robot motion across a series of extensive empirical studies involving real robots and human subjects. Inspired by field-deployment challenges, I will then present a data-driven framework that enables robots to recover from failure via bystander help without overloading users. I will conclude with future directions on the development of shared and full robot autonomy that explicitly reasons about human perceptions to produce safe, trustworthy, and comfortable robot behavior.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

Biography: Christoforos Mavrogiannis is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa. His interests lie at the intersection of robotics, human-robot interaction, and artificial intelligence. His research often draws insights from algebraic topology and dynamical systems, tools from machine learning, planning and control, and inspiration from social sciences. He is a full-stack roboticist, passionate about real-world deployment of robot systems, and extensive benchmarking with users. He has been a best-paper award finalist at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and selected as a Pioneer at the HRI and RSS conferences. He has also led open-source initiatives (Openbionics, MuSHR), for which he has been a finalist for the Hackaday Prize and a winner of the Robotdalen International Innovation Award. His work has received coverage from many media outlets including Wired, IEEE Spectrum, GeekWire, RoboHub, and the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation. Christoforos holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University, and a Diploma in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.


Host: Jesse Thomason

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109

Audiences: By invitation only.

Contact: Assistant to CS chair