Fostering Human-Robot Rapport
We explore how robots can exhibit social skills, like building rapport, that can facilitate positive long-term human-robot interactions.
Our Research
Robots as Social Agents
We examine how factors such as robot personality, customizability, and autonomy can influence human-robot interactions.
Interaction-Shaping Robotics
We study how robots can shape human-to-human interactions in groups to improve group outcomes such as trust and inclusion.
Recent News
Mar 6, 2025
🏆 Best Paper Nomination at HRI 2025
Our paper Balancing User Control and Perceived Robot Social Agency through the Design of End-User Robot Programming Interfaces (authors: Alex Wuqi Zhang, Rafael Queiroz, and Sarah Sebo) to be presented at HRI 2025 by Alex Wuqi Zhang has been nominated for best paper!
Mar 6, 2025
Four Papers to be Presented at HRI 2025
Our group has four papers accepted to the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2025) and we will present our work on March 6th (the final day of the conference):
- Balancing User Control and Perceived Robot Social Agency through the Design of End-User Robot Programming Interfaces by Alex Wuqi Zhang, Rafael Queiroz, and Sarah Sebo
- Connection-Coordination Rapport (CCR) Scale: A Dual-Factor Scale to Measure Human-Robot Rapport by Ting-Han Lin, Hannah Dinner, Tsz Long Leung, Bilge Mutlu, J. Gregory Trafton, and Sarah Sebo
- Enabling End Users to Program Robots Using Reinforcement Learning by Tewodros W. Ayalew*, Jennifer Wang*, Michael L. Littman, Blase Ur, and Sarah Sebo
- Exploring Robot Personality Traits and Their Influence on User Affect and Experience by Alex Wuqi Zhang, Clark Kovacs, Liberto de Pablo, Justin Zhang, Maggie Bai, Sooyeon Jeong, and Sarah Sebo
Jul 12, 2024
PI Sarah Sebo Receives NSF CAREER Award
Sarah received the NSF CAREER award to fund work focused on developing social skills for robots to interact and collaborate with groups of people! You can read more about this exciting award and project in this UChicago CS Department news article.
Apr 14, 2024
HRI Lab Participation at Museum of Science and Industry Robot Block Party
UChicago's HRI lab participated in the Museum of Science and Industry's annual Robot Block Party this past weekend, where we were able to showcase our robots and talk about human-robot interaction research with the Chicago community. It was fantastic to participate in such a fantastic event with other amazing roboticists in the Chicago area! During the event, our lab members and robots were also featured on local Chicago TV stations NBC Chicago and WGN News.
