Robotics at Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Helping incorporate artificial intelligence into robots, enabling them to perceive, make decisions, and learn
Robotics research at Khoury College is an interdisciplinary field that explores how to create intelligent machines that can interact with the physical world and collaborate with humans. This brings together work on perception, how robots sense their world; manipulation, how they physically interact with it; planning and navigation, the ways robots make decisions on how to act on their own; and human-robot interaction (HRI), understanding how to make collaboration between robots and humans productive and safe.
Transforming industries and everyday life
Research in robotics is transforming industries and day-to-day life in many ways. Advanced manufacturing taps robotics to automate repetitive or dangerous tasks, making companies more efficient and decreasing the risk of injury. Khoury College’s research in this area has made new approaches possible in health care, from robotic surgery and rehabilitation tools to robots that provide companionship for people in recovery. Logistics and transportation are increasingly dependent on robots for warehouse work, and autonomous vehicles, though not yet in our driveways, are widely used in specific business contexts.
With the widespread popularity and acceptance of AI tools on computers, robots will likely be used in customer service roles, answering questions, and potentially even serving meals at restaurants, tasks that require strong background research in human psychology as well as computer science.
Sample research areas
- Multi-robot coordination
- Robot manipulation
- Perception, planning, and control algorithms
- Reinforcement learning, planning, and abstraction
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
- Intelligent agents
- AI-driven techniques
- Social robots
- Social implications and safety of robots
- Human robot collaboration
Khoury researchers: At the forefront
Current project highlights
Khoury researchers have worked with NASA to develop capabilities in robots that will travel to Mars and beyond.
Robotics have great potential to improve the quality of life for people living with disabilities, and Khoury researchers are exploring semi-autonomous robotic grasping capability that augment human skills.
Khoury researchers developed a way for robots to work together to deliver from a bar to customers, pointing the way to build robotic systems that can coordinate tasks even in environments where there are many random factors.
Recent research publications
Fourier Transporter: Bi-Equivariant Robotic Manipulation in 3D
Authors: Haojie Huang, Owen L. Howell, Dian Wang, Xupeng Zhu, Robert Platt, Robin Walters
Khoury researchers are learning how to teach robots to perform complex tasks without requiring many practice runs or demonstrations.
Equivariant Reinforcement Learning Under Partial Observability
Authors: Hai Nguyen, Andrea Baisero, David Klee, Dian Wang, Robert Platt, Christopher Amato
This research improves how robots learn in situations where they don’t see everything by teaching them to recognize and reuse similar solutions they’ve found before. This trick helps robots learn new tasks much faster and perform better, both in simulations and in the real world.
Health Counseling by Robots: Modalities for Breastfeeding Promotion
Authors: Prasanth Murali, Teresa O’ Leary, Ameneh Shamekhi, Timothy Bickmore
NU researchers have discovered that using robots for breastfeeding counseling is effective and well-received by women, considered an effective, safe, and non-judgemental way to provide health education.
Related labs and groups
Faculty members
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Christopher Amato
Christopher Amato is an associate professor at Khoury College and head of the Lab for Learning and Planning in Robotics. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, AI, and machine learning, including planning and reinforcement learning in partially observable and multi-agent/multi-robot systems.
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Megan Hofmann
Megan Hofmann is an assistant professor at Khoury College. Her human–computer interaction and personal health informatics research often centers around the development and evaluation of accessible tools, including for people with disabilities.
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Huaizu Jiang
Huaizu Jiang is an assistant professor at Khoury College. His research interests include computer vision, computational photography, machine learning, AI, and natural language processing.
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Zhi Tan
Zhi Tan is an assistant professor at Khoury College. He studies how robots interact with the world and how they can be integrated with human users, each other, and intelligent systems.
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Robin Walters
Robin Walters is an assistant professor at Khoury College. He leads the Geometric Learning Lab, where his research explores the role symmetry can play in developing data-efficient, trustworthy deep learning models.
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Lawson Wong
Lawson Wong is an assistant professor at Khoury College. His research focuses on learning, representing, and estimating knowledge about environments and the world in ways that autonomous robots can use.