Marynel Vázquez: Robots in group settings

With an oven, a coffee maker and fridge, the far side of Danny Rakita’s lab on the third floor of A.K. Watson Hall looks a lot like any workplace break room. Here, though, robots will be doing the meal preparations.

It’s part of Rakita’s effort to program robots to become accustomed to helping out in home care settings.

“We want to make deploying kinds of devices a lot more effective in the real world,” said Rakita, assistant professor of computer science.

Walk upstairs to the lab of Marynel Vázquez and you’ll see a device that she’s programming to help make pizza, as part of a robot-human cooking team. She’s developing ways for robots and humans to work together naturally, attuned to the sort of nuances that come with any seasoned partnership — ​where all parties are able to pick up on each other’s cues, like tone of voice or facial expressions.

“One of the things that drives a lot of our work is advancing how robots make sense of the social world that they’re in,” said Vázquez, assistant professor of computer science.

The number of roboticists in the School has more than doubled in recent years, and Rakita and Vazquez are just two of the faculty driving the new Engineering initiative known as Robotics for Humanity. As the field of robotics is poised to make an impact on modern life as pervasive and revolutionary as computers did a few decades ago, Yale Engineering is working to help integrate them seamlessly and beneficially into the home, the workplace, in healthcare and other aspects of our lives.

The Robotics labs are already immersed in interdisciplinary collaborations both within the School as well as with Law, Psychology, Medicine, Environment, Architecture, Management, and the Humanities, making Yale uniquely positioned to take on essential human challenges.

The School and the University are investing both resources and space in robotics helping to cement Yale as a leader in Robotics, enhance on-campus visibility and create a “must visit” space for students and visitors. Here’s a look at roboticist Marynel Vázquez, and some of the groundbreaking work that’s happening in her lab:

As more robots begin sharing our spaces, the more important it is that we get along with them. That’s where Marynel Vázquez comes in. The assistant professor of computer science specializes in Human-Robot Interaction. One example of her work can be seen with Shutter, a robot designed in her lab that interacts with passersby and offers to take a photo as a memory of their time on campus. The researchers track when passersby choose to interact with Shutter, and how they behave toward the robot.

It’s one of the projects designed to help robots understand the many different social settings they could find themselves in. With an interdisciplinary approach that combines computer science (especially artificial intelligence), behavioral science, and design, Vázquez is helping robots make sense of their surroundings and how to respond appropriately. That means a lot of her studies involve social group settings. One-on-one encounters tend to get more attention in the robotics field, but Vázquez notes that multiple-party situations happen everywhere — on campus, in homes, and in workplaces.

“Chances are the robots are going to see these multiparty encounters over and over again the more they are deployed in unstructured environments, doing things for people in the future,” she said. “So it’s not just enough for the robots to work and function. Robots and humans have to actually understand each other.”