Research Vision
Robot Studio is a multi-disciplinary research lab that designs current and future relationships between robots and us that are inspiring, refined, and magical. We achieve this by building robots that are intentional in their function and aesthetically beautiful, to uncover the many connections we can have with robots in the contexts of health and the arts. We use theories and methods from Computer Engineering, Psychology, and Design Research to study how we can be build robots that empower us and to search how robots can be a tool to support better understanding of who we are. In Robot Studio, we experience what it is to be a full-stack roboticist.
Robot Studio was created and is directed by Patricia Alves-Oliveira.
News
June 10th, 2025: Prof. Patricia started a new HRI reading group at University of Michigan called Robo Reflections.
June 1st, 2025: Welcome to the Visiting Ph.D. students, Francesca Cocchella and Ugne Morkute, who will be working with us for the summer!
May 21st, 2025: We received the ICRA 2025 HRI award for Arts & Robotics for our work on the AURA project!
April 18th, 2025: AURA project had demo accepted in Arts & Robotics track at ICRA 2025.
April 18th, 2025: Atharva Kashyap was accepted as a ICRA 2025 volunteer and was accepted to present a Late Breaking Results Poster.
April 7th, 2025: Grace Pan was awarded the Pathways@RSS fellowship to attend the RSS 2025 conference.
April 4th, 2025: Erfun Ackley defended his Master’s Thesis on Exploring Creative AI Systems.
March 31st, 2025: Prof. Patricia was a keynote speaker at the AAAI Spring Symposium on Child-AI Interaction in the Era of Foundation Models in California.
February 23rd, 2025: Prof. Patricia gave a talk about “Inspiring Robots” on Chicago Creative Machines.
February 7th, 2025: Poster on robots for incarcerated youth accepted at WeRobot 2025.