Project Grant 2441014

This National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant, awarded under the CFDA Program 47.041 Engineering, provides $361,090 to Carnegie Mellon University to develop new methods that enable robots to better understand and respond to nuanced safety challenges in real-world environments. The research aims to advance scientific knowledge and contribute to national well-being by making robots more trustworthy and effective across settings like homes, public spaces, and hospitals. Key project initiatives include creating a "Robotics Red-Teaming Challenge" for college students, engaging K-12 students in hands-on robot programming experiences, and collaborating with stakeholders to establish safety benchmarks and promote safe robotics practices. The award supports fundamental research to generalize robot safety frameworks beyond collision avoidance, empowering robots to automatically assess their internal models, update safety representations based on human feedback, and generalize safety policies for uncertain environments. The research will be evaluated through hardware experiments using robot arms and mobile manipulators in unstructured settings like kitchens and atriums.