Heni Ben Amor, an assistant professor, was previously a research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, where he led a project to improve robots for future applications in industrial settings, especially manufacturing. Prior to moving to Georgia Tech, Ben Amor worked with Jan Peters at the Technical University Darmstadt as a postdoctoral scholar. Ben Amor’s research topics focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, human-robot interaction, robot vision, and automatic motor skill acquisition. He received the highly competitive Daimler-and-Benz Fellowship as well as several best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences. He also serves on the program committee of various AI and robotics conferences, including AAAI, IJCAI, IROS, and ICRA.

Email: hbenamor@asu.edu
Website: henibenamor.weebly.com

Fabian Weigend joined the Interactive Robotics Lab as a postdoc in Fall 2022. Fabian’s academic career spans multiple disciplines and countries. He completed his BSc and MSc in computer vision and machine learning in Germany and Singapore. For his PhD studies, he received a full-time scholarship for a collaboration between the Human Performance Sciences group and the Centre for Research in Computing, Mathematics, and Data Sciences in Sydney, Australia. His main research directions were image segmentation, multi-task learning, evolutionary computation, and human performance modeling. He joined the Interactive Robotics Lab to work on predictive biomechanics and human motion prediction from low-fidelity sensor data.

Email: fweigend@asu.edu

Geoffrey Clark is a PhD student at Arizona State University and part of the Interactive Robotics Lab run by Dr. Heni Ben Amor. After majoring in engineering with a strong focus on robotics, he proceeded to work as a mechatronics engineer for SpringActive where he had the chance to research and design software and hardware for state of the art lower limb prosthetic devices. When he returned to academia his knowledge and experience with prosthetic devices pushed him to explore new AI and machine learning approaches to robotic control in human centered applications.

Email: gmclark1@asu.edu

Shubham Sonawani is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at ASU. He joined the Interactive Robotics Lab in Fall 2018; before that he finished his MS in Electrical Engineering at ASU and Bachelor of Technology  at VJTI, India. His research interests include reinforcement learning based manipulation and grasping, motion planning, computer vision and controls. Furthermore, he has worked on multiple research projects, including a joint research project with NASA/JPL on “In-space assembly of objects using arm augmented cubesat.” He is also one of the winners of the KEEN research grant. He wants to use his knowledge and skills to improve the current state of the art approaches in AI and machine learning for robotics.  

Email: sdsonawa@asu.edu

Xiao Liu is a Computer Science Ph.D student, he joined Interactive Robotics Lab at SCAI ASU in Summer 2020. Before ASU, he got his MS degree at Case Western Reserve University  in Mechanical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Kiju Lee, on the topics of Social Robotics and AI-based cognitive devices. He got his BS degree from SWJTU, China. His research is now focusing on Differentiable Bayesian Filters, Representation Learning, Generalization and Optimization of Depth Perception, and their applications in Human-robot Interaction (HRI). He also works as a Research Engineer for a Phoenix-based start-up company, RadiusAI.

Email: xliu330@asu.edu
Website: xiao-liu.me

Michael Drolet is a Mathematics Master’s student at Arizona State University. He is a member of the Interactive Robotics Lab, with a research focus on imitation learning and human-robot interaction. Michael has worked in various software development roles in the industry. Additionally, he is working on a bi-manual manipulation project in Mujoco sim, where multiple modalities are controlled using classical and learned controls.

Email: mdrolet@asu.edu
Website: drolet.io

Yifan Zhou is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at ASU. He joined the Interactive Robotics Lab in Fall 2021. Prior to that, Yifan received his MS in artificial intelligence at CMU and BS in Computer Science at SWJTU, China. He has worked on multiple projects both in academia and industry, including topics on robot learning, natural language processing, computer vision and tactile sensing. His research interests include language conditioned robot learning, multimodal machine learning and deep learning. His goal is to enable real robots to understand human instructions and learn complex tasks fast.

Email: yzhou298@asu.edu
Website: yifanzhou.com

Joe Campbell is a Computer Science PhD student in the Interactive Robotics Lab, having previously completed a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Computer Engineering at Arizona State University. He has worked on several different projects during this time, including planning algorithms, GPU performance estimation, and autonomous vehicle concurrency modeling frameworks which have been presented at conferences such as CASE, ICCAD, and ITSC. He is the recipient of an NSF EAPSI 2015 fellowship in which he performed research in Singapore relating to traffic light inference for autonomous vehicles as part of his MS thesis. Outside of academia, he has more than six years of experience as a Software and Systems Engineer at companies such as Garmin and Intel.

Email: jacampb1@asu.edu 
Website: https://sites.google.com/asu.edu/jcampbell/

Simon Stepputtis is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Arizona State University and joined the Interactive Robotics Lab in December 2016. He did his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Engineering and Computing at the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany. During his time in Germany he primarily worked on Human-Robot Interaction. His research at ASU aims towards cooperative Human-Robot Interaction.

Email: sstepput@asu.edu
Website: simonstepputtis.com

Mark Strickland is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at ASU.  His work in the Interactive Robotics Lab has focused on construction and programming of biologically-inspired robots and simple gait analysis.  Prior to attending ASU, Mark was a partner in the patent litigation practice at the law firm of Perkins Coie.  Before his career in the law, Mark worked as a systems programmer for the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago, and as an aerospace engineer at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.  His academic background includes a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a J.D. from Northwestern University.

Email: mestric1@asu.edu
Website: mestrickland.com

Bassem Makni is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Co-Director at the Interactive Robotics Lab working on neural-symbolic approaches for human-robot interaction using natural language. After earning his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he worked on deep learning for noise-tolerant RDFS reasoning, he joined the AI Reasoning group at IBM research to work mainly on reinforcement learning for automated theorem proving and on leveraging knowledge graphs for natural language understanding. His research interests include neuro-symbolic AI, ontological reasoning, noise-tolerant reasoning, natural language understanding, and human-robot interaction.

I am a graduate student in computer science, with my research focusing on combining deep learning in computer vision and efficient reinforcement learning to help provide robots with the capability to avoid potentially harmful future states. My passion lies in the application of machine learning specifically the application of deep learning on complex problems. I completed my Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University.

Ashish Kumar is a Master’s student at the Arizona State University. He completed his Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, India, in 2010. He worked with Deloitte Consulting as a Technology Consultant before joining ASU in Fall, 2015. He started working under Dr. Heni Ben Amor a few months ago towards his Master’s thesis. His academic and research interests lie in artificial intelligence, machine learning and intelligent agents. Currently, he is working on Human-Robots Interactions.

Cesar D. Tamayo is a junior undergraduate student in Computer Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Motivated by Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Embedded Systems, he is currently collaborating with Ph.D. student Mark Strickland in the implementation of a Collision Avoidance System using Deep Learning, particularly using Webots to generate a data set for training/testing purposes.

Email: ctamayoc@asu.edu

Hannah Kerner is an Exploration Systems Design PhD candidate in the Interactive Robotics Lab and Bell Planetary Imaging Group at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on deep learning applications in planetary science, e.g. novelty detection on planetary surfaces. Before coming to ASU, she worked as a flight software engineer at Planet, Inc., a cubesat remote sensing company that images the entire Earth every day. She has completed internships at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hannah received her BS in computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she completed an honors thesis on real-time collision-free navigation for micro air vehicles.

Email: hkerner@asu.edu
Website: http://hannah-rae.github.io/

Indranil Sur is a Master’s Student in the Computer Engineering Program of ASU. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian School of Mines Dhanbad, India in 2010. Prior to joining the Master’s program he worked at Aricent in Tele-Communication domain and at Samsung in Kernel-Stability and Bootloader. Currently he is working on developing Safe Reinforcement Learning methods and studying the nature of safe policy learning in human brain. His research interest are Reinforcement Learning, Policy Learning, Dynamical Motor Primitives.

Kevin Sebastian Luck is a research assistant at the Interactive Robotics Lab since January 2016. He did his Bachelor’s studies at Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, with a final thesis about dimensionality reduction and policy search, published in the proceedings of IROS 2014. During his Master’s studies at the same institution, he had an exchange year at Aalto University, Finland. There he worked as a student researcher at the Intelligent Robotics Group lead by Ville Kyrki and developed a novel policy search algorithm integrating group factor analysis, published in the proceedings of AAAI 16.His field of interest is Machine Learning for Robotics using stochastic methods.

Email: ksluck@asu.edu 
Website: kevin-luck.com

Nambi Srivatsav is a masters student in the Computer Science Program at Arizona State University. He received his bachelor’s degree in CS and has two years of work experience in Software Industry. He joined Interactive Robotics Lab in July 2016. He is currently working on a Honda funded project in training robot policies using external memory based networks. His major interests are Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning.

Nikhil did his Master Thesis with us and got a position at Intuitive Surgical.

Who are you?
I am Nikhil, a Master’s student in Computer Engineering (Fall 14).
How did you get interested in (interactive) robotics?
My fascination towards robotics grew as I worked with embedded systems and participating in Lego events.
In which (research) topics, you are interested?
Bi-manual manipulation
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on developing Bi-manual Learning techniques for a Basketball Playing Robot using Reinforcement learning.
What is your goal for the future?
I would love to work in robotics product development areas.
Website: http://shortcircuits.io

I am a graduate student in Computer Engineering at Arizona State University, with my research interests focused on the principles and applications of Computer Vision. I completed my Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Kumaraguru College of Technology (Affiliated to Anna University), Coimbatore, India.
I have nearly 2 years of industrial experience working at Robert Bosch Engineering in Automotive Embedded Software development. Currently I am working on developing a vision based system, which could simultaneously track and project augmented information on objects. My focus on the project is in developing and optimizing a model based (using edges) object tracker for Human-Robot collaborative environments, utilizing the image feed from a monocular camera.

Ricky Johnson is a senior undergraduate student in the Computer Systems Engineering student in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.  Ricky is currently a NASA Space Grant intern and is constructing and programming a football playing robot that will have the ability to track a football player as they run across the field in order to throw a football to the player. This is Ricky’s first experience in the field of research and he hopes to have a fully functioning robot by the time that he graduates.

Trevor Barron is a PhD Student in the Computer Science Program at ASU. He received his bachelor’s degree in CS from Colorado College in 2014. Before coming to ASU, Trevor spent two years split between a software position at Lockheed Martin and a teaching assistant position under his undergraduate adviser at Colorado College. Some of his past projects include development of visualization methods for neural networks trained on natural language data and an exploration of potential extensions for a vision-based deep reinforcement learning agent in a 3D environment. He is currently working on a Toyota-funded project to optimize human-robot handover tasks specifically intended for people with disabilities. His research interests are reinforcement learning and neural networks.

Email: tpbarron@asu.edu

I am a Master’s student in the Computer Science department at ASU (Fall’15) and received a B.tech. degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Indore (IIT-I).

I started working with Prof Heni Ben Amor a few months back and got introduced into the world of robotics. I am currently working on developing an Interactive environment for humans & robots to work simultaneously and safely. I’m interested in Augmented Reality, 3D Graphics and Algorithms.
In future I’d like to see and work towards creating a world where latest technologies are easily accessible to make human life much more easier.

David Vogt is a researcher and PhD student at the Technische University Bergakademie Freiberg. He received his master’s degree in Computer Science in 2011 and is currently working at the Virtual Reality and Multimedia Group Freiberg. His research interests are around human-robot and human-agent interaction. In particular, he is currently focusing on character animation in direct human-agent interactions. David is visiting our lab from February till April.

Hirofumi Shin is PhD student at the Osaka University.
He has JSPS Research Fellow from April 2017, and received his master’s degree in Information Science and Technology and is currently working in the Department of System Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University since April 2015. His research interests are in biologically inspired and biomimetic robot and locomotion.

Philipp Beckerle received his Dr.-Ing. in mechatronics from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 2014. He is chief engineer and deputy head of the Institute for Mechatronic Systems at TU Darmstadt and heads “Human-Mechatronics Synergy” research. His main research topics are human-machine-centered design, elastic actuation, and control of assistive robotic systems. His further interest is in modeling, simulation, control, human factors, biomechanics, fault diagnosis/tolerance as well as human-machine interaction. Philipp is visiting our lab from February till March.

Shuhei Ikemoto received his Ph.D. degree in engineering from Osaka University in March 2010. He had been a JSPS Research Fellow from April 2009 to March 2010, an assistant professor in the Department of Multimedia Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University from April 2010 to June 2014, and a specially appointed assistant professor of The Institute for Academic Initiatives, Osaka University since July 2014 to March 2015. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of System Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University since April 2015. His research interests include biologically inspired robots and algorithms, and physical human-robot interaction.