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HomeYorRobotsNews and eventsEventsSeminar series2025Getting Comfortable around Humans: A Path for Close and Physical Human-Robot Collaboration

Getting Comfortable around Humans: A Path for Close and Physical Human-Robot Collaboration

Seminar

This event has now finished.

Event date
Wednesday 12 November 2025, 2pm to 3pm
Location
In-person and online
ISA 135, Institute for Safe Autonomy (Map)
Booking
Booking not required

Event details

Recent breakthroughs in robotics have significantly narrowed the gap between humans and robots. However, the integration of robots into environments that require close co-existence or physical interaction with humans remains largely underdeveloped. Achieving a human-like level collaboration in such close scenarios requires seamless communication and mutual understanding of each other’s abilities—qualities essential to any safe and effective teamwork. To achieve this, robots must not only communicate and understand human natural language, but also develop a nuanced understanding of human physical capabilities, safety, ergonomics and a shared sense of embodiment. This entails integrating layers of responsive, reactive, and safety-certified functionalities into AI-driven multimodal interaction through intuitive language-based interfaces, and biomechanics insights. In this talk, I highlight the core elements of such comprehensive safe and functional approach and the tools to make robots and humans comfortable around each other.

About the speaker

Dr. Luis Figueredo

Dr. Luis Figueredo is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, UK. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Brasilia, Brazil, with a half-tenured period at the CSAIL Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For his work on multi-arm manipulation, he was awarded a Best Ph.D. Thesis from Brazil and multiple robot-demo awards at IROS and ICAPS, and from companies such as Rethink Robotics.  After his PhD, Luis was awarded the prestigious Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to conduct his research at Leeds. During this period, he pioneered a few works on biomechanics-aware manipulation planning and developed open-source AI tools acknowledged by the EU Innovation Radar. Prior to his current position, Luis was the scientific coordinator of the Geriatrics Lighthouse Initiative at the Technical University of Munich (TUM)  and founder-organizer of the Geriatronics Summit, which happens annually in Germany.  For his achievements at TUM, he was recognized as the first Associated Fellow at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at TUM, and most recently, as an IEEE Senior Member, and IEEE ICRA New Generation Star. With a robust interdisciplinary background, Dr. Figueredo has contributed significantly to the fields of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), biomechanics-aware manipulation, NLPs grounded in manipulation constraints, cooperative robotics, and geometric methods and control for robotics.

Venue details

Wheelchair accessible