CMSC 20630: Human-Robot Interaction: Research and Practice

Spring 2025

Robots are increasingly common in our everyday spaces: tutoring elementary students, assisting human workers in manufacturing contexts, providing museum tours, interacting with families within their homes, and helping to care for the elderly. One critical factor to the success of these robots is their ability to effectively interact with people: human-robot interactions.

This course focuses on the core concepts and cutting-edge research in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), covering topics that include: nonverbal robot behavior, verbal robot behavior, social dynamics, norms & ethics, collaboration & learning, group interactions, applications, and future challenges of HRI. In class meetings, students lead discussions about cutting-edge peer-reviewed research HRI publications. In weekly labs, students engage in hands-on activities to learn the essential skills of human-robot interaction research, including experiment design, robot programming, and data analysis techniques. Students also participate in a quarter-long collaborative research project, where they pursue an HRI research question that involves conducting their own human-subjects research study where they recruit human subjects to interact with a robot.

The prerequisite for this course is completion of either CMSC 14200 or CMSC 15400. This course is considered within the CS curriculum areas of both Robotics and Human Computer Interaction and counts towards the Human Computer Interaction BS specialization.