OUR ORIGIN STORy…

Part of the Collaborative Robots and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute at Oregon State University, CHARISMA stands for Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine learning and Art.

Comedy, acting, and the arts have unique practices in terms of repeatably conveying character, motivations, and relationships to a human audience that may benefit the development of everyday robots. Entertainment also offers venues for deploying robots, constructing knowledge about social robots, and collecting data {money} from large numbers of people at a time. The street can also be a stage, anything to get robots out of “the lab.”

What ever the formative or summative design strategy, CHARISMA develops robot behavioral software and interfaces that take humans into account. Recent work considered multi-robot expressive motion, coordinated human and furniture-robot motions, and develops intuitive controllers for underwater robots to remove barnacles and maintain surfaces underwater. We create saliency models for robot tasks and integrate ethnography-inspired customizations into real-world robot systems.

Our main research contributions are in Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, two fields which seek to optimize the human-robot interface, integrating the fields of engineering, programming, electrical engineering and psychology. One unique aspect of this lab is our additional integration of insight from the performing arts.