Human Interaction and Robotics Group
Welcome to the Human Interaction and RObotics [HIRO] Group!! Our work lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-AI Teaming with the goal of building robot systems that enable close, natural, and extended cooperation with humans.
Our work is ambitious, impactful, and often goes against the grain. We work on what’s hard, and we focus on important problems with potential for positive societal impact. We have built a large and diverse group that attracts top talent from leading institutions and consistently produces award-winning research. Many of our students have gone on to secure highly competitive fellowships and leadership roles in academia and industry.
Our group is within the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU Boulder. If you want to learn more about our research and you would like involved with the lab, feel free to stop by during our weekly meetings!! For Summer 2025, we will be holding group meetings in ECES 116 on Wednesdays at 11.30 am (biweekly).
The HIRO Group is funded by the following organizations:
Our research is both human-inspired and human-centered. We believe that to build truly capable and general-purpose robots, we must look at people not just as users, but as models of intelligence. Two pillars of human cognition guide our work: our ability to learn through embodied interaction with the physical world, and our capacity for social intelligence in complex, cooperative settings. These principles motivate the two core research threads in the lab: Embodied Intelligence and Sensorimotor Learning, and Social Intelligence and Algorithmic Human-Robot Interaction.
For more details on our research efforts, please visit our list of publications.
We develop robots that can operate safely and effectively in cluttered, dynamic, and contact-rich environments. Our work treats contact as a structured source of information, not as failure, and builds sensing and planning capabilities around this principle. From scalable, whole-body skins to algorithms that intentionally use contact to achieve goals, we equip robots to interact with the physical world through feedback and adaptation.
In the future, we aim to formalize the concept of morphological intelligence, enabling robots to reason about their own bodies to select robust and efficient strategies in complex scenarios. This approach will expand the range of tasks robots can perform and improve resilience to uncertainty and partial failure.
Point of Contact: Caleb Escobedo, Anuj Pasricha, Nataliya Nechyporenko, Gilberto Briscoe-Martinez, Stéphane Aroca-Ouellette, Joewie J. Koh, Yutong Zhang, Jay Vakil
We design robots that align with human partners through structured representations, implicit signals, and environment shaping. Our research focuses on creating agents that reason over shared task models, adapt to human strategies without retraining, and communicate intent through predictable motion and environmental cues. Current work shows that these methods improve fluency, trust, and team performance in collaborative settings.
In the future, we aim to incorporate models of human expectation directly into trajectory optimization, producing behaviors that are not only functional but also intuitive to humans. This direction enables more effective teamwork in domains such as assistive care, education, and high-stakes decision-making.
Point of Contact: Jake Brawer, Kaleb Bishop, Clare Lohrmann, Yi-Shiuan Tung, Stéphane Aroca-Ouellette, Ava Abderezaei, Srikrishna Bangalore Raghu, Chi-Hui Lin, Naren Sigvanadasan