This thesis aims to determine the impact that Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have on social interactions, and then improves the AAC user experience through a user focus design process. AAC devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and make...
Multiagent coordination has many real-world applications such as self-driving cars, inventory management, search and rescue, package delivery, traffic management, warehouse management, and transportation. These tasks are generally character-ized by a global team objective that is often temporally sparse - realized only upon completing an episode. The sparsity of the shared...
Robots have the potential to protect health care workers, provide patient care, and ultimately save lives in infectious disease outbreaks. Nevertheless, infectious disease outbreak scenarios present unique technological and social challenges for robotics. This work explores what robots can and should do in the fight against infectious diseases. We present...
Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...