RSS Workshop on Social Robot Navigation

Chris (Christoforos) Mavrogiannis is a postdoctoral research associate in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Srinivasa. His interests lie at the intersection of motion planning, multiagent navigation, and human-robot interaction, and he often draws tools from topology and machine learning. He is currently working on the design of planning algorithms for robot navigation in multiagent environments including driving domains and crowded pedestrian spaces. He is also leading MuSHR, the lab's project on the development of an autonomous robotic racecar, and coordinates the lab's contributions to the Honda Curious Minded Machine Project for the development of robots that leverage curiosity to interact seamlessly with their human partners. Chris holds MS and PhD degrees from Cornell University, and a Diploma in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.

Pete Trautman received his B.S. in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Baylor University in 2000. He then entered the United States Air Force, serving as a program manager and researcher at the Sensors Directorate. In 2012, he completed his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech. His thesis research focused on robot navigation in dense human crowds, the result of which was a probabilistic model of human robot cooperation, a 6 month case study in Caltech’s student cafeteria and an ICRA 2013 Best Paper Finalist award. Pete has since worked in Boeing factory automation and defense contracting. He now works at the Honda Research Institute USA on robot navigation in human crowds.

Francesca is currently pursuing her Ph.D. program in the Department of Aerospace at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She received a B.S. in Biomechanics Engineering and a M.S. in Robotics Engineering from the University of Pisa and a M.S. in Aerospace from Caltech. She is currently working as an intern at Honda Research Institute USA under the supervision of Peter Trautman. Her research interests span guidance, navigation and control (GNC), motion planning, computer vision, machine learning, data science, and robotics. Her current research project focuses on deep reinforcement learning for robot social navigation in dense human crowds.

Marynel Vázquez is an Assistant Professor in Yale’s Computer Science Department, where she leads the Interactive Machines Group. Her research focuses on advancing multi-party human-robot interaction, both by studying social group phenomena and developing algorithms that enable autonomous robot behavior. Recently, her research has been funded by a 2019 Amazon Research Award and the National Science Foundation. Marynel received her bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar in 2008, and obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Before Yale, she was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and a close collaborator of Disney Research.

Leila Takayama is an associate professor of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. Prior to joining UCSC in 2016, she was a senior user experience researcher at GoogleX, and was a research scientist and area manager for human-robot interaction at Willow Garage. With a background in Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Human-Computer Interaction, she examines human encounters with new technologies. Dr. Takayama completed her PhD in Communication at Stanford University. She also holds a PhD minor in Psychology from Stanford, a master's degree in Communication from Stanford, and bachelor's of arts degrees in Psychology and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.

Siddhartha S. Srinivasa is the Boeing Endowed Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington. He earned his PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. He works on robotic manipulation, with the goal of enabling robots to perform complex manipulation tasks under uncertainty and clutter, with and around people. To this end, he founded the Personal Robotics Lab in 2005. He is also passionate about building end-to-end systems (HERB, ADA, HRP3, CHIMP, Andy, among others) that integrate perception, planning, and control in the real world. Understanding the interplay between system components has helped produce state-of-the-art algorithms for robotic manipulation, motion planning, object recognition, and pose estimation (MOPED), dense 3-D modeling (CHISEL, now used by Google Project Tango), and mathematical models for human–robot collaboration.