This talk will present work from the CHARISMA Robotics lab at Oregon State University, an acronym for Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine learning and Art, which is directed by Prof. Heather Knight. Inspired by methods and practices from entertainment, this talk will review robot communication, behavior systems, and flexible, iterative approaches to autonomous and human-in-the-loops designs. From robot furniture to robot comedy, from nonverbal expressions to the cultural situation of robots in the workplace or on the sidewalks, CHARISMA contributes to the fields of human-robot interaction and social robotics, regularly deploying robots in naturalistic human settings and entertainment contexts via remote interfaces.

Bio:

Dr. Heather Knight runs the CHARISMA Robotics research group at Oregon State University, which applies methods from entertainment to the development of more effective and charismatic robots. Their research interests include minimal social robots, multi-robot/multi-human social interaction, and entertainment robots. Outside of Oregon State, Knight also runs an annual Robot Film Festival. Past honors include robot comedy on TED.com, a robot flower garden installation at the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, and a British Video Music Award for OK GO's "This Too Shall Pass" music video, featuring a two-floor Rube Goldberg Machine. She has been named to Forbes List's 30 under 30 in Science and AdWeek's top 100 creatives. Prior to her position here, she was a postdoc at Stanford University exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces, conducted a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University exploring Expressive Motion for Low Degree of Freedom Robots, and received a M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed a sensate skin for a robot teddy bear at the MIT Media Lab. Additional past work includes robotics and instrumentation at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics.