OUR ORIGIN STORy…

Part of the Collaborative Robots and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute at Oregon State University, CHARISMA stands for Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine learning and Art. Our main research contributions are in Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, two fields which seek to optimize the human-robot interface, integrating the fields of engineering, programming, electrical engineering and psychology. One unique aspect of this lab is our additional integration of methods and practices from the field of entertainment.

Performance, acting, and art have unique practices in terms of repeatably conveying character, motivations, and relationships to a human audience that may benefit the development of everyday robots. Entertainment also offers venues for deploying robots and potentially new approaches to constructing knowledge about social robots, and avenues for collecting data from large numbers of people at a time, e.g., in a performance setting or in the wild.

The desired outcome of these efforts are robot behavioral software and strategies that can be applied to robots operating in real world human environments. We have collaborations with industry, regularly deploy robots in naturalistic human settings, and we develop & share hardware, software, interfaces and methods that we hope will support the development of charismatic robots for roboticists at large.