News and Events

2024

• [February 2024] Our paper "Initial Task Assignment in Multi-Human Multi-Robot Teams: An Attention-enhanced Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Approach" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters! Check out the paper (Link) and the paper website (Link).

• [January 2024] Our paper "Husformer: A Multi-Modal Transformer for Multi-Modal Human State Recognition" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems! Check out the paper (Link) and our source code (Link).

2023

• [December 2023] Dr. Byung-Cheol Min gave an online research talk titled "Towards Incorporating Elderly Preferences and Demonstrations into Robot Learning" at Kyung Hee University, Korea, as part of their AgeTechService International Symposium.
• [November 2023] Our team visited West Lafayette Jr./Sr. High School as part of our NSF CAREER Project to conduct an outreach activity. For more details, please visit our Outreach page (Link).
• [November 2023] Arjun Gupte presented his research poster titled "Modeling and Simulating Initial Task Allocation in Multi-Human Multi-Robot Teams" at the 2023 Purdue Fall Undergraduate Research Expo. Congratulations! Congrats, Arjun!
• [October 2023] Ruiqi Wang presented his paper, titled "Initial Task Allocation for Multi-Human Multi-Robot Teams with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning", at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023), Detroit, USA.

• [October 2023] Tamzidul Mina presented his paper, titled "Beacon-based Distributed Structure Formation in Multi-agent Systems", at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023), Detroit, USA.

• [October 2023] Go-Eum Cha presented her paper, titled "Implications of Personality on Cognitive Workload, Affect, and Task Performance in Robot Remote Control", at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023), Detroit, USA.
• [September 2023] Dr. Byung-Cheol Min gave an invited talk titled "Integrating Human Intelligence into Robot Learning" at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.
• [August 2023] Dr. Byung-Cheol Min has been elevated to IEEE Senior Member. Congratulations to him on this significant accomplishment!
• [June 2023] Dr. Byung-Cheol Min gave an invited talk titled "Integrating Human Intelligence into Robot Learning" at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea.
• [April 2023] Our team hosted a week-long outreach event with local high school students and their teacher at West Lafayette High School, IN. Throughout the five-day program, high school students participated in interactive lessons and hands-on coding activities based on Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), a popular framework for developing robotic systems, and engaged with cutting-edge robotics research and applications through a poster presentation seminar conducted by the Purdue SMART Lab. 
• [March 2023] Go-Eum Cha presented her research poster, titled "Operator Personality and Task Performance in Robot Surveillance: A Statistical Analysis", at the 2023 Spring Purdue Polytechnic Research Impact Area Student Poster Symposium.
• [March 2023] Ruiqi Wang presented his research poster, titled "Initial Task Allocation for Multi-Human Multi-Robot Teams", at the 2023 Spring Purdue Polytechnic Research Impact Area Student Poster Symposium.
• [March 2023] Arjun Gupte joined the project team as an undergraduate research assistant. Welcome Arjun!
• [January 2023] (Done) We are currently looking for a highly motivated undergraduate student for this CAREER project on human multi-robot systems (Flyer). If you are a Purdue undergraduate student and interested in Robotics, please email Dr. Min.

2022

• [December 2022] Our team did an international outreach for high school students and their teachers at Macau Anglican College. We gave an online seminar; we presented various topics including an introduction to Purdue University and Purdue SMART Lab, and our current research in the area of human-robot interaction, and also had a Q&A session with them.
• [December 2022] The project team had a meeting with James Basinger, a Deputy Commissioner of Operations in Indiana Department of Correction, to discuss potential applications of our proposed affective workload allocation system for multi-human multi-robot teams (Link).
• [November 2022] Wonse Jo has successfully defended his PhD thesis "Affective Workload Allocation System for Multi-human Multi-robot Teams". Wonse will start his new chapter at the the University of Michigan as a postdoc. Congrats, Dr. Jo!!
• [November 2022] You are invited to a PhD dissertation defense presentation by Wonse Jo. It’s open to all students and faculty. You can find more details about the defense from the flyer (Link). A full abstract is available (Link).
• [November 2022] Revanth Krishna Senthilkumaran presented his research poster titled "Dynamic Cognitive Workload Allocation Method for Human-Robot Interaction" at the 2022 Purdue Fall Undergraduate Research Expo (Link). Congratulations! Congrats, Revanth!
• [October 2022] (Done) Our team started a new user study to evaluate a new affective multi-robot controller by comparing it with various workload allocation methods. If you are interested to participate in our study, please visit this link. 
• [May 2022] Revanth Krishna Senthilkumaran has been awarded Third Prize for the interdisciplinary oral research presentations at the 2022 Spring Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference (Link). Congrats, Revanth!
• [May 2022] Wonse Jo presented his research poster, titled "A New Stimulus Tool to Generate and Measure Visual Perceptual and Cognitive Loads for Teleoperated Human-Robot Teams", at the 2022 Spring Purdue Polytechnic Research Impact Area Student Poster Symposium, and has been awarded Second Runner Up. Congrats, Wonse!
• [04/14/2022] Revanth Krishna Senthilkumaran presented his research talk, titled "A GUI for Measuring Cognitive Workload Stimulus in Human-robot Interaction", at the 2022 Spring Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference.  Please check out the presentation video (link).
• [March 2022] (Done) We are looking for participants who will help us develop an affective multi-robot controller capable of estimating human affective states. If you are interested in this study and want to get more information, please check our flyer (Link)!
• [March 2022] Wonse Jo presented his research poster titled "Development of Adaptive Controller for Human-Robot Team" at the Autonomous Day 2.0 that was held at the WestGate Academy Conferencing and Training center in Odon, Indiana.
• [February 2022] Our paper titled “Correlation between Unconscious Mouse Actions and Human Cognitive Workload” has been accepted as "Late-Breaking Work" at the ACM CHI 2022 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems! Congrats, Go-Eum!
• [February 2022] Revanth Krishna Senthilkumaran joined the project team as an undergraduate research assistant. Welcome Revanth!
• [February 2022] Our paper titled "Toward a Wearable Biosensor Ecosystem on ROS 2 for Real-time Human-Robot Interaction Systems" has received the Excellent Paper Award from the IEEE IROS 2021 Workshop on Cognitive and Social Aspects of Human Multi-Robot Interaction (HMRS). Congrats, Wonse!
• [January 2022] Ruiqi Wang joined the project team as a graduate research assistant. Welcome Ruiqi!

2021

• [December 2021] Jaeeun Kim was successfully graduated as Class of 2021. Congrats, Jaeeun!
• [December 2021] Our team visited the Purdue Polytechnic High School (PPHS)​ North to introduce our ongoing research to K-12 students, and showed our ROS2-based multi-robot platforms (called SMARTmBOT), and gave opportunities for students to program the SMARTmBOT.
• [September 2021] Our paper “Toward a Wearable Biosensor Ecosystem on ROS 2 for Real-time Human-Robot Interaction Systems” was accepted to the IROS 2021: Workshop on Cognitive and Social Aspects of Human Multi-Robot Interaction (HMRS 2021). This paper is in collaboration with Prof. Steve McGuire at UC Santa Cruz. Please check out the paper (Link), presentation video (Link), and GitHub repository (Link). Congrats, Wonse!
• [August 2021] Dr. Min gave an invited talk on "Robot Design, Planning, and Control for Environmental Applications" at the International Conference on IT-Bio Convergence.
• [JUne 2021] We are excited to introduce a new, low-cost, and open-source mobile robot platform, called SMARTmBOT (v2021) that we have developed. We provide a detailed tutorial, and all design files and source codes, so that you can build your own SMARTmBOT. Please check out its full demo video (Link) and GitHub repository (Link).
• [May 2021] Our demonstration titled "ROS2 Open-Source Swarm Robot Platform: SMARTmBot" has been accepted to be presented at the 2021 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Workshop on Robot Swarms in the Real World: From Design to Deployment - Live Demonstration, Xi'an, China, May 30 - June 5, 2021. You can check out our video demonstration (link). Congrats, Wonse!
• [May 2021] Jaeeun Kim has been awarded 1st Place at the 2021 Spring Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference, in the category of Research Talks in Purdue Polytechnic Institute (link). You can watch her presentation from this link.
• Congrats, Jaeeun! 
• [April 2021] Dr. Byung-Cheol Min, received the FY21 Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration Award to honor his interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work, from Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University! Congrats, Dr. Min! (link)
• [February 2021] Dr. Byung-Cheol Min received the 2020 Outstanding Faculty Award in Discovery (Research) from the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Purdue University.
• [January 2021] NASA selected our Purdue-Hongik Team as a Finalist Team for the NASA Space Robotics Challenge Phase 2 Competition. Wonse, Shyam, Go-Eum, and Dr. Min are members of the team. Visit this link for more details.

2020

• [November 2020] Tamzidul Mina has successfully defended his PhD thesis "Social Behavior based Collaborative Self-organization in Multi-robot Systems". Tamzid will start his new chapter in Sandia National Lab. Congrats, Tamzid!
• [November 2020]  Dr. Min gave an online invited talk titled "Towards Adaptive Human Multi-Robot Systems" at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea.
• [November 2020]  SMART Lab's CAREER project team conducted a virtual outreach event for K-12 students of the Purdue Polytechnic High School (PPHS)​. In the meeting, we introduced our NSF CAREER project and our ongoing research and showed a virtual lab tour video (link).
• [November 2020]  Wonse Jo presented "Affective Adaptive Control System for Multi human Multi robot Teams" at the Fall 2020 Realizing the Digital Enterprise (RDE) - Mini-Talks event (video). 
• [November 2020] Goeum Cha presented "Human Cognitive Load Prediction with Behavioral Cues for Human-Machine Interaction" at the Fall 2020 Realizing the Digital Enterprise (RDE) - Mini-Talks event (video). 
• [November 2020] Jaeeun Kim presented "Development of an Open-source Mobile Robot Platform for Swarm Research Application" at the Fall 2020 Realizing the Digital Enterprise (RDE) - Mini-Talks event (video). 
• [October 2020] Wonse Jo presented the paper titled "ROSbag-based Multimodal Affective Dataset for Emotional and Cognitive States" at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC). You can check out this paper (link).
• [September 2020] Our paper titled "Investigating the Effect of Deictic Movements of a Multi-robot" was published in International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. You check out this paper (link) and supplementary video (link). 
• [August 2020] Our paper titled "Adaptive Workload Allocation for Multi-human Multi-robot Teams for Independent and Homogeneous Tasks" was published in IEEE Access. You can check out this paper (link) supplementary video (link).
• [July 2020] Our paper titled "Asymptotic Boundary Shrink Control with Multirobot Systems" was published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. You can check out this paper (link) supplementary video (link).
• [April 2020] Shaocheng Luo has successfully defended his PhD. A title of his dissertation is "Multi-robot System in Coverage Control: Deployment, Coverage, and Rendezvous". Shaocheng will start his new chapter at the University of Alberta. Congratulations!
• [February 2020] Dr. Min received the Purdue University’s 2020 Focus Award to recognize his dedication to disability and accessibility. 
• [January 2020] Our team launched a new Github page to share our GUI programs and ROS packages for reading wearable psychological sensors and cameras. If you are interested in our study, please visit this link. 

2019

• [December 2019] (Done) Our team started a new user study to collect emotional and behavioral data using various wearable psychological sensors and cameras. If you are interested to participate in our study, please visit this link. 
• [November 2019] Our team visited the Purdue Polytechnic High School (PPHS)​ to introduce our ongoing research to K-12 students, and showed the adaptive telepresence robot platform and web-based emotion detection program.
• [November 2019] Our team participated in the 2019 Purdue Fall Undergraduate Research Expo that is is an opportunity for undergraduate researchers to showcase the scholarly work and creative endeavors they have been engaged in through oral or poster presentations. Three posters were presented at this event: "A Study on the Impact of Movements and Audiovisual Feedback in Swarm Robots on Users" by Jaeeun Kim, "Development of ​an Adaptive Human-Robot Teleoperation Platform" by Walter, and "Development of Low-Cost, Simplified Humanoid Head" by Yuta Hoashi.
• [November 2019] Our team participated in the Purdue Next Generation Scholar that is an outreach event for local high school students to explore Purdue. Two posters were presented at this event: "Human-swarm Robot Interaction Platform for STEM Education" by Wonse Jo, and "You Cannot Hide Your Emotions From Us!" by Manoj Penmetcha.
• [October 2019] Jaeeun Kim joined the project team as an undergraduate research assistant. Welcome Jaeeun Kim!
• [October 2019] Tamzidul Mina presented the paper titled "Efficient Resource Distribution by Adaptive Inter-agent Spacing in Multi-agent Systems" at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) in Bari, Italy. You can check out this paper (link) supplementary video (link).
• [September 2019] This project website was launched.