Robotics

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies how people perceive, understand, trust, and physically coexist with robots, treating that relationship as a design problem in its own right rather than a side effect of good engineering. This course covers why HRI is a distinct discipline sitting at the intersection of robotics, psychology, and design, how robots communicate intent through legible motion and signals, why the uncanny valley and appearance/behavior mismatches cause discomfort, how trust in a robot gets calibrated (and miscalibrated) over time, and how proxemics shapes what counts as a comfortable robot approach in different social contexts.