Research-Informed Social Robotics
Peerbots is a research-informed tech nonprofit. Our work is grounded in rigorous academic research. We conduct our own internal research following our strategy of raising the floor of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research rather than focusing on raising the ceiling. We hope that our work will help people more practically benefit from research findings, and that more diverse perspectives will get involved and be represented in HRI research. This page walks you through our research efforts, both within Peerbots and through collaborations.
Peerbots Research Fellowship
Each year, we fund and collaborate with early-career scholars to advance human-centered social robotics and translate academic discoveries into open-source tools available to everyone.
Robot Face Perception and Expressive Cue Design with Vizij.ai
Hyunju is replicating and extending HRI work on robot face perception using Vizij.ai - the framework Peerbots is adopting for our free robot faces. Her fellowship work examines how expressive robot faces influence people’s perceptions of robots in interaction, and what these perceptions suggest for the design of robot identities, social cues, and expressive behaviors.
Featured Publications
Recent publications from the Peerbots team.
Analyzing Adoption Factors for Humanoid Robot Communication Features in Industry Contexts
Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '26) • pp. 317-331
Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to be designed to interact in diverse social contexts. Yet, recent commercial prototypes often omit expressive communication features, such as faces and gestures. This disconnect raises questions about how communication modalities are actually selected for real-world deployment. In this study, we interviewed 12 industry decision-makers involved in humanoid robot development to examine the factors that guide their design adoption choices. Our findings show that technical feasibility, cost, safety, reliability, and organizational priorities frequently outweigh the benefits of communication modalities. By highlighting where practitioner considerations align with or diverge from established design research, this study offers a grounded, industry-facing perspective on the design of humanoid communication. Interpreting our findings, we present a conceptual framework to guide design researchers in understanding decision-making for product development in industry contexts.
Vizij: Supporting the design, animation, and deployment of rendered robot faces
Proceedings of the 3rd AAAI Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development (UR-RAD)
Screen-based rendered robot faces have become increasingly prevalent in social robotics as cost-effective, expressive alternatives to mechanical facial systems. However, infrastructure for designing, animating, and deploying these faces remains fragmented. In this work, we present Vizij, an open-source pipeline and authoring architecture for social robot faces that bridges real-time parametric animation with extensible hardware rendering.
Partner With Us on Research
Are you interested in deploying Peerbots in an upcoming study, writing a joint grant proposal, or testing new teleoperation techniques in your lab? Reach out and our team will connect with you.