{"668153":{"#nid":"668153","#data":{"type":"news","title":"New PEO Scholar Continues Quest to Build Assistive, Customizable Robots","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EFor Erin Botti, the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) provided the answer to what she wanted to do with her life.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EHer father was an engineer, and her mother was a psychologist. She was interested in both.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u201cI realized there was this whole field of human-robot interaction, which combines those two fields,\u201d Botti said. \u201cI get to code the robot and write algorithms and I also get to run human-subject experiments and analyze how people feel about the robot.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EIt isn\u2019t the dynamics and intricacies of robotics that drives Botti as much as the human element that HRI explores.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u201cWhen I tell people I work with robotics, they ask if I\u2019m working on Terminator,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m trying to do the opposite \u2014 building robots that are helpful and customizable.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EBotti, a fourth-year Ph.D. student under the advisement of Interactive Computing Assistant Professor Matthew Gombolay, recently received the P.E.O. Sisterhood\u2019s Scholar Award. The merit-based award is given to women pursuing doctoral-level degrees and comes with a $20,000 scholarship.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EThe P.E.O. Sisterhood is an educational organization founded in 1869 dedicated to the advancement of women in higher education with more than 6,000 local chapters in North America and about 250,000 active members.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u201cIt\u2019s nice to be honored,\u201d Botti said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t really expecting it. It can help me go to more conferences that I wouldn\u2019t necessarily be able to attend otherwise. A lot of my time here was during Covid, so we didn\u2019t get to travel much. It\u2019ll be nice to broaden my network and see other types of research.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EThe bulk of Botti\u2019s research has focused on training robots through human demonstration, also known as Learning from Demonstration (LfD).\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EBotti received a best paper award in 2022 from the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction for co-authoring \u201cMIND MELD: Personalized Meta-Learning for Robot-Centric Imitation Learning.\u201d The paper explores robots designed to be taught by everyday people and how the robot can learn correctly if users lack the expertise to teach them.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u201cPeople can be suboptimal when giving demonstrations because they may not understand the robot or there may be a correspondence problem,\u201d Botti said. \u201cMaybe your arm is different from the robot\u2019s arm, and when you perform the motion, it may not work as well. People can also take shortcuts that the robot should not follow. And people are heterogenous. The way I would show the robot to do something is different from the way someone else would.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u201cWe developed an algorithm that learns from suboptimal and heterogenous demonstrators. It uses personalized embedding that describes how a person is suboptimal, and then we can use that embedding to learn how to correct their demonstrations and shift them to be better.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EBotti also co-authored a paper that was accepted to the 2022 Conference on Robotic Learning (CoRL), which expanded upon her research in the HRI paper as to how robots can provide feedback to their human trainers.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003EBotti is now researching how to develop in-home robot assistant for the older adults that can perform daily chores, such as loading a dishwasher, and adapt to user preferences.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003E\u201cErin is on the cusp of putting robots in the hands of regular people in their homes to learn and perform assistive tasks and validating decades of research in robotics,\u201d Gombolay said. \u201cHer unique focus on robotic assistance for the elderly will have significant broader impacts on society. She is bright, inquisitive, savvy, and fearless, and this award will help her leverage those assets to change the world of robotics.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EErin Botti,\u0026nbsp;a fourth-year human-robot interaction\u0026nbsp;Ph.D. student, recently received the P.E.O. Sisterhood\u2019s Scholar Award. The merit-based award is given to women pursuing doctoral-level degrees and comes with a $20,000 scholarship.\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"A fourth-year Ph.D. student studying human-robot interaction recently received the P.E.O. Sisterhood\u2019s Scholar Award."}],"uid":"32045","created_gmt":"2023-06-20 16:50:45","changed_gmt":"2023-07-12 18:07:16","author":"Ben Snedeker","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2023-06-20T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2023-06-20T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"670998":{"id":"670998","type":"image","title":"Erin Botti","body":"\u003Cp\u003EErin Botti, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in robotics at Georgia Tech poses with four-legged robot (Photos by Terence Rushin\/Colege of Computing)\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","created":"1687279855","gmt_created":"2023-06-20 16:50:55","changed":"1687279855","gmt_changed":"2023-06-20 16:50:55","alt":"Erin Botti, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in robotics at Georgia Tech poses with four-legged robot (Photos by Terence Rushin\/Colege of Computing)","file":{"fid":"253985","name":"Erin Hedlund_86A8765.jpeg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/2023\/06\/20\/Erin%20Hedlund_86A8765.jpeg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/2023\/06\/20\/Erin%20Hedlund_86A8765.jpeg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":63161,"path_740":"http:\/\/tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/2023\/06\/20\/Erin%20Hedlund_86A8765.jpeg?itok=vXbCb-Wt"}}},"media_ids":["670998"],"groups":[{"id":"50876","name":"School of Interactive Computing"}],"categories":[{"id":"152","name":"Robotics"},{"id":"8862","name":"Student Research"}],"keywords":[{"id":"667","name":"robotics"},{"id":"187915","name":"go-researchnews"}],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"39521","name":"Robotics"}],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ENathan Deen, Communications Officer\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n\r\n\u003Cp\u003ESchool of Interactive Computing\u003C\/p\u003E\r\n","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["Nathan.deen@cc.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}