Welcome to the RT² Lab! We are a group of researchers (from Computer Science and Engineering backgrounds) designing new approaches for robot teaching and teaming. Our mission is to develop human-centered robot technologies that elevate human work.

Our lab develops algorithms, interfaces, and full-stack robot systems. A major application area we study is manufacturing, where many tasks are difficult for people (e.g., physically demanding) and difficult to automate (i.e., highly variable). Our current research spans three key areas:

• Human-Centered Teaching Tools – Teaching new tasks to robots – especially for tasks involving contact of dexterous manipulation – remains a challenge. In developing solutions, we engage directly with domain experts to design solutions that are effective and usable. We develop novel physical interfaces and end-user programming approaches to make it easier for humans to task and retask robots.
• Uncertainty-Aware Assistance – Achieving robust autonomy is pervasive in many settings, such as when there is limited data or tasks are complex, contact-rich, or underdefined. We investigate how robots can self-assess their confidence and selectively minimize human input. We also explore the intersection of shared autonomy and emergent robot learning approaches (e.g., generative AI).
• Contextualized Systems and Human Studies – We partner with domain experts to understand challenges related to adoption of robot technologies and to evaluation our teaming and teaming technologies across diverse tasks and end users. We design/evaluate our technologies using tools from human-centered design.

Please check out the Publications page to learn more about recently published research and visit the Join Us page if you are interested in getting involved in research.