CMSC 20630: Human-Robot Interaction: Research and Practice
Winter 2024
Robots are increasingly common in our everyday spaces: tutoring elementary students, assisting human workers in manufacturing contexts, providing museum tours, interacting with families within their homes, and helping to care for the elderly. One critical factor to the success of these robots is their ability to effectively interact with people: human-robot interactions.
This course focuses on the core concepts and cutting-edge research in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), covering topics that include: nonverbal robot behavior, verbal robot behavior, social dynamics, norms & ethics, collaboration & learning, group interactions, applications, and future challenges of HRI. Course meetings involve students in the class leading discussions about cutting-edge peer-reviewed research HRI publications. Students also participate in a quarter-long collaborative research project, where they pursue an HRI research question that often involves conducing their own human-subjects research study where they recruit human subjects to interact with a robot.
This course is offered as a Computer Science HCI elective. The course has no prerequisites, however backgrounds in robotics or human-computer interaction is encouraged. Programming knowledge is not necessary, however, is often useful for the course project.
Course Info
- Course Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 9:30 - 10:20am CST in JCL 011
- Course Schedule: the schedule page includes webpages for each class meeting as well as deadlines for course deliverables
- Course Project: the project page details the expectations for the HRI course project
- Office hours:
- Sarah: Tuesdays from 4:00pm - 5:00pm in JCL 373
- Lauren: Wednesdays from 10:30am - 11:30am in JCL 379
Teaching Team
