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). More details below.

• 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.