Toward Fluent Collaboration in Human-Robot Teams

with Tariq Iqbal,
University of Virginia
April 13th, 1:00 PM, Goodwin 440

Robots currently have the capacity to help people in several fields, including health care, assisted living, and manufacturing, where the robots must share physical space and actively interact with people in teams. The performance of these teams depends upon how fluently all team members can jointly perform their tasks. To succeed within a group, a robot must be able to perceive other members' actions, model interaction dynamics, predict future actions, and adapt their plans accordingly in real time. In the Collaborative Robotics Lab (CRL), we develop novel perception, prediction, and planning algorithms for robots to fluently coordinate and collaborate with people in complex human environments. In this talk, I will highlight various challenges of deploying robots in real-world settings and present our recent work to tackle several of these challenges.

 Tariq Iqbal is an Assistant Professor of Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to joining UVA, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in CS from the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Iqbal leads the CRL, which focuses on building robotic systems that work alongside people in complex human environments, such as factories, hospitals, and educational settings. His research group develops artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms to enable robots to solve problems in these domains.