Sera Buyukgoz

My research interest focuses on human-robot interaction. My current project is based on automatic synthesis and instantiation of proactive behavior by robot during human robot interaction as a part of the ANIMATAS project. I received my MSc in Robotics with Merit from Plymouth University, UK in 2017, after getting my BSc in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey in 2016. Before starting my position, I worked as a Visiting Researcher at KOVAN Research Lab, METU, Turkey where I work on safety in human-robot collaboration by using light weighted industrial robots.

Proactivity is defined as acting in anticipation of future needs, problems and situations. In the cases when robots are supposed to be living with humans at home, such capabilities will be very much desirables, for them to be dynamic and useful companion and cohabitant. There are range of scientific and R&D challenges towards realizing such capabilities in a robot, such as situation assessment, anticipation of future, and planning for proactivity. There is also a lack of coherent theory of proactivity, and how to identify different types of proactive behaviours, an artificially intelligent agent can instantiate. Further, there are questions of trustworthiness of such robots, because such robots will take some new decisions/interaction actions on the fly, instead of just being reactive or active. So, another question will be how to regulate the synthesis of such proactive interaction behaviours. All these issues will be addressed in a systematic manner in this ESR project.