Authors
Yifei Zhu
Venue
Mines PhD Dissertation
Publication Year
2026
The versatility of robot assistants has created new opportunities and challenges for human-robot interactions (HRI). For the robot assistants being deployed across these diverse roles and settings, it is critically important that those robots be capable of clear, effective, and natural communication with their human interactants.
While many robots employ natural language to interact with humans, language alone is insufficient in many domains. To address this challenge, multi-modal robot communication (especially robots' use of co-speech gestures) has been used to enhance both the clarity of robot communication and the quality of users' overall experience. However, many robots face morphological or processing limitations that prevent their use of physical gestures.
Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a promising solution to this further challenge, allowing robots to convey information and express intent through visualizations rendered over users' fields-of-view. This dissertation thus explores how AR can be used to support HRI in service of this goal. In particular, this dissertation explores (1) how we should design and integrate AR-based robot gestures to avoid cognitive overload and facilitate natural, effective communication, and (2) how we can embed social justice principles into HRI research. This dissertation makes these contributions through both empirical findings and novel theoretical frameworks.
