Peerbots Publications
Peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings, and white papers investigating robot teleoperation, care wizardry, and human-robot interaction.
Academic Research & Scientific Literature
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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.
Operational Constraints vs Social Benefits: Trade-offs Shaping Industry Adoption of Humanoid Communication Modalities
2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '26 Industry Track)
Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to function in everyday social settings, yet many commercial prototypes intentionally limit expressive features, such as faces or gestures. While human-robot interaction research highlights the benefits of such modalities, realworld deployment demands often drive different choices. This white paper draws on interviews with 12 industry professionals involved in the development of humanoid robots to examine how communication features are evaluated during adoption decisions. We found that operational constraints related to technical feasibility, cost, safety, reliability, and organizational strategy frequently outweigh the potential social benefits of adopting new modalities. This white paper presents a grounded view of how industry decision-makers navigate trade-offs that shape the design of humanoid robots in real-world settings.
Vizij: A Workshop & Tutorial on Expressive Robot Faces
Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '26)
Software infrastructure for rendered robot faces is fragmented, yet there are many open research questions to address regarding robot faces, emotional expression, gaze, and animation. In this workshop-tutorial hybrid, we invite researchers and practitioners interested in robot faces to share their expertise and learn about the Vizij open source ecosystem and how it can be used to define, animate and deploy expressive rendered robot faces fully integrated with various robot platforms. We will illustrate the full software pipeline required to implement an expressive social robot face starting from scratch and going all the way to defining and connecting a custom face to a real-time conversational engine. Participants will be able to follow along on their own devices viewing and controlling their custom rendered robot face. Participants will also hear from ecosystem partners who have begun integrating with Vizij and learn about best practices and lessons learned.
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.
Agreeing to Disagree: Translating Representations to Uncover a Unified Representation for Social Robot Actions
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series • pp. 346-352
Researchers and designers of social robots often approach robot control system design from a single perspective; such as designing autonomous robots, teleoperated robots, or robots programmed by an end-user. While each design approach presents a tradeoff between some advantages and limitations, there is an opportunity to integrate these approaches where people benefit from the best-fit approach for their use case. In this work, we propose integrating these seemingly distinct robot control approaches to uncover a common data representation of social actions defining social expression by a robot. We demonstrate the value of integrating an authoring system, teleoperation interface, and robot planning system by integrating instances of these systems for robot storytelling. By relying on an integrated system, domain experts can define behaviors through end-user interfaces that teleoperators and autonomous robot programmers can use directly thus providing a cohesive expert-driven robot system.
Hardships in the Land of Oz: Robot Control Challenges Faced by HRI Researchers and Real-World Teleoperators
2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) • pp. 1294-1300
Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) is one of the most widely used experimental methodologies across the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), making WoZ teleoperation interfaces a critical tool for HRI research. Yet current WoZ teleoperation interfaces are overwhelmingly tailored towards a narrow set of HRI interaction paradigms. In this work, we conducted a set of interviews with HRI researchers to better understand the diversity of teleoperation needs across the HRI community. Our analysis highlighted (1) human challenges, with respect to wizards' expertise, the need for quick responses, and research participants' unpredictability; (2) robot challenges, with respect to robot malfunctions, delays, and robot-driven complexity, and (3) interaction challenges, with respect to researchers' varying control requirements and the need for precise experimental control. Moreover, our results revealed unexpected parallels between the experiences of HRI researchers and real-world teleoperators, which open up fundamentally new possibilities for future work in robot control interfaces and encourage radically different perspectives on what types of interfaces are even needed to best facilitate WoZ experimentation. Leveraging these insights, we recommend that WoZ interfaces (1) be designed with extensibility and customization in mind, (2) ease interaction management by accounting for unpredictability and multi-robot interactions, and (3) consider WoZ teleoperators beyond the context of experimentation.
Understanding Barriers to Entry and Invisible Labor for Educational Care Wizards
2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) • pp. 1287-1293
Recent work on Socially Assistive Robotics in Therapy has revealed a dual-cycle model, with the vast majority of prior work on Socially Assistive Robotics narrowly focused on the human-robot interaction, termed the 'inner cycle'. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the activities performed before and after the interaction, termed the 'outer cycle',in which authoring and evaluation also take place. Authoring and evaluation are activities that are key sources of invisible labor for Therapists who serve as Care Wizards (i.e., SAR teleoperators). In this work, we consider the outer cycle needs of Care Wizards in another key Socially Assistive Robotics domain, Special Education, with a careful eye toward the barriers to entry and invisible labor that may manifest in this domain, and how those barriers and invisible labor might be subverted and mitigated. Our interviews with six Care Wizards who teleoperate robots in Special Education contexts reveal new insights surrounding these stakeholders' needs. Our key insights are that (1) support systems are necessary for SAR adoption; (2) currently invisible Care Wizard labor may be indirectly compensated; and (3) training must be personalized to specific Care Wizards.
Beyond the Session: Centering Teleoperators in Socially Assistive Robot-Child Interactions Reveals the Bigger Picture
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW2) • pp. 1-27
Socially assistive robots play an effective role in children's therapy and education. Robots engage children and provide interaction that is free of the potential judgment of human peers and adults. Research in socially assistive robots for children generally focuses on therapeutic and educational outcomes for those children, informed by a vision of autonomous robots. This perspective ignores therapists and educators, who operate these robots in practice. Through nine interviews with individuals who have used robots to deliver socially assistive services to neurodivergent children, we (1) define a dual-cycle model of therapy that helps capture the domain expert view of therapy, (2) identify six core themes of teleoperator needs and patterns across these themes, (3) provide high-level guidelines and detailed recommendations for designing teleoperated socially assistive robot systems, and (4) outline a vision of robot-assisted therapy informed by these guidelines and recommendations that centers teleoperators of socially assistive robots in practice.
Practical Considerations for Deploying Robot Teleoperation in Therapy and Telehealth
2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) • pp. 977-984
Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have shown promise, but there are still practical challenges to their widespread adoption. Recent research has demonstrated the advantages of teleoperated systems in this space and called for better guidelines for teleoperation interfaces. We ran group usability tests with therapists with no experience with robots to learn more about the challenges they face. We found that robot-novice therapists understand how robots can be effective in therapy. However, learning to use a robot interface can be challenging for new users. These challenges include the unfamiliar metaphors used for robot connection and the need to create, acquire, or share robot interaction content. We also identify users' needs that are perhaps non-obvious in a research context, such as privacy of client health information and professional boundaries with client families when using electronic tools. We make several recommendations based on analysis of our group usability tests: (1) developing dedicated interfaces for content authoring that account for caregiver technical expertise, (2) implementing content organization and sharing tools, (3) using connection metaphors that non-technical users may be more familiar with such as phone calls or web URLs, (4) considering user privacy in connection methods chosen, especially within telehealth. Most importantly, we encourage further research in SAR teleoperation that focuses on caregivers as teleoperators.
Robot Co-design Can Help Us Engage Child Stakeholders in Ethical Reflection
2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) • pp. 930-934
Children are stakeholders of robotic technologies who deserve to have their voices heard in the design process just as much as adult stakeholders. This is especially true for robotic technologies explicitly designed for child-robot interaction, in areas like education, healthcare, and therapy. Researchers face the challenge of cultivating children's critical awareness on the design of robots and accompanying ethical concerns, as the types of exercises typically used to engage with adult stakeholders can be ineffective with children. This requires developmentally appropriate methods for understanding children's perspectives that also address the imbalanced power dynamics between children and adults-such that children feel comfortable sharing their ideas. In this work, we demonstrate that participatory design research techniques already accepted in the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) community can fulfill this purpose. Specifically, through the design and analysis of two co-design workshops with children of different ages at a school in Denver, Colorado, we demonstrate that co-design workshops can be used to effectively understand how children make sense of robotic technologies and to facilitate children's critical reflection on the ethical dilemmas surrounding their own relationships with robots.
Analyzing Teleoperation Interface Usage of Robots in Therapy for Children with Autism
Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '21) • pp. 496-501
Therapist-operated robots can play a uniquely impactful role in helping children with autism practice and acquire social skills. While extensive research within Human-Robot Interaction has focused on teleoperation interfaces for robots in general, little work has been done on teleoperation interface design for robots in the context of therapy for children with autism. Moreover, while clinical research has shown the positive impact robots can have on children with autism, much of that research has been performed in a controlled environment, with little understanding of the way these robots are used in practice. We analyze archival data of therapists teleoperating robots as part of their regular therapy sessions, to (1) determine common themes and difficulties in therapists’ use of teleoperation interfaces, and (2) provide design recommendations to improve therapists’ overall experience. We believe that following these recommendations will help maximize the effectiveness of therapy for children with autism when using Socially Assistive Robotics and the scale at which robots can be deployed in this domain.