Yale researchers to help lead NSF Center studying how robots and people learn to live and work together
As part of a $30 million National Science Foundation grant led by the University of Texas at Austin, Yale researchers will help build a new science of "human-robot co-adaptation" – studying not only how people change as they live alongside assistive robots, but how those robots themselves must change and adapt as they spend longer and longer in use with an individual person.
The five-year award establishes the Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation, one of three new National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers announced this week. The center brings together 39 researchers across six universities – UT Austin, Indiana University Bloomington, MIT, Tufts, the University of Utah, and Yale – along with industry partners including Amazon, Apptronik, Google DeepMind, and NVIDIA, to understand how robots and the people who live and work alongside them change each other's behavior over months and years, not just single interactions.
Yale's involvement reflects a model Brian Scassellati and his colleagues have deliberately built over the past several years: building robots and AI-based technology in close conjunction with both the engineering side, in Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science, and the human side, in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The Yale contingent, seven faculty in all, unites computer scientists and engineers with researchers in psychology, cognitive science, sociology, and public health.
Brian Scassellati, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering, is a co-principal investigator on the award and will lead the center's research into dyadic human-robot co-adaptation – how trust, values, and understanding build between an individual person and the robot they interact with over time. Marynel Vazquez, assistant professor of computer science, will contribute to the center's research on how robots navigate group settings – from balancing competing requests to reading shifting social dynamics among multiple people – and will also direct the center's education and human resource development efforts, including a national Research Experience for Undergraduates program. They are joined on the Yale team by Nicholas Christakis (Sociology), Yarrow Dunham (Psychology), Melissa Ferguson (Psychology), Julian Jara-Ettinger (Psychology), and Emma Zang (Sociology), whose work spans social networks, social development, cognitive science, and aging.
Yale will also host two of the center's real-world testing sites, part of a broader Human Environment with Robots (HERO) Facility Network spanning all six partner universities. At the Yale Peabody Museum, researchers will study how robots interact with members of the public in an open, high-traffic setting. And in private homes with older adults – including individuals living with mild cognitive impairment – Yale researchers will build on the university's own long-running work deploying robots in people's homes over extended periods.
We're especially excited about the opportunity to deploy more robots in the home," said Scassellati. “It's one of the most difficult environments to get right, and it's an area where our team has built deep experience over many years. This center lets us bring that work to bear at a much larger scale.”
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Published Date
Aug 28, 2026
