Sep 05: A new National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, led by the University of Texas at Austin, will study what happens when assistive robots leave the lab and move into the real world to live and work alongside humans.
The Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation will bring together 39 researchers from six universities and multiple industry partners to establish a new science of “human-robot co-adaptation”—how people and robots learn from one another and adjust their behavior over long periods in everyday settings that will include homes, hospitals and assisted-living residences.
The University of Utah will play a central role in the new center under the leadership of Daniel Brown, assistant professor in the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering’s Kahlert School of Computing. The Utah contingent of researchers has expertise spanning human-AI alignment and safety, robot learning and manipulation, human-centered computing and human factors.
“A lot of research into robotics research today focuses on whether a robot can successfully complete a particular task,” Brown said. “Through this center, we want to dive deeper and understand what happens when a person and a robot live and work together for weeks, months or even years.”
“This kind of long-term study of co-adaptation is really only possible with the kind of large-scale effort afforded by the center,” he said. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to get the research we’ve been developing in the lab into hospitals, dormitories, museums and care facilities to better understand how to create human-robot interactions that benefit and empower people.”
Other Kahlert faculty involved with the 5-year collaboration, which is funded by a $30 million NSF grant, include Tucker Hermans, Jason Wiese and Kenneth Marino, along with Frank Drews, a Utah professor of psychology.
The University of Utah will also provide one of the center’s most important real-world proving grounds. Through the Human Environment with Robots Facility Network, robots will be deployed at University of Utah Health sites, including the Craig H. Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital and the planned One U Residential Center, designed to support independent living for people with complex physical injuries.
Craig H. Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital is a leader in patient-facing technology and innovation, providing a clinical environment to develop and test new technologies that can increase patient independence, improve rehabilitation outcomes and support care teams. The project builds on a longstanding collaboration between Jason Wiese; Dr. Jeffrey Rosenbluth, Vice Chair of Innovation and Community Programs at Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital; James Gardner, who coordinates the development of new patient-facing technology at Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital; and Brent Eliesen, Health Innovation Team Lead with University of Utah Information Technology.
Their work includes the hospital’s 75 smart patient rooms, where assistive technologies are integrated into patient care and studied in a clinical setting. This established infrastructure and experience provide a strong foundation for expanding this work into assistive robotics.
These real-world settings will allow researchers to study how patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals and robots adapt to one another during extended, real-world interactions—moving robotics research beyond short laboratory experiments toward technologies that can safely support rehabilitation and independent living. Utah will also contribute to the center’s education and outreach efforts through collaborations with the Utah STEM Action Center.
“This project gives us a chance to study robotics where the technology really matters: alongside people in their everyday environments,” Wiese said. “We want to understand how robots can adapt to individual needs and support greater independence.”
Partner universities include Indiana University Bloomington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Yale University. Industry collaborators include Amazon, Apptronik, Diligent Robotics, Google DeepMind, Hello Robot, MassRobotics, NVIDIA and Robust AI.