The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $703,424 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) to develop hardware and software tools to facilitate communication between robots and humans through visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces. The research aims to formalize the bidirectional exchange between humans and robots as a closed-loop dynamical system, enabling assistive robots to learn user preferences intuitively and communicate their own learning process clearly. This work under NSF's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will support robotics education by engaging high school students, college seniors, and underrepresented engineering faculty. The five-year project, which began on August 1, 2024, seeks to advance the fundamental understanding of how learning and communication can be unified into a single, interconnected system to improve human-robot interaction.
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