Maja Matarić Pioneered Socially Assistive Robotics

The robots may have conversations, play video games, and reply to feelings.

At this time the IEEE Fellow is a professor at USC. She research how robots can assist college students with anxiousness and melancholy endure cognitive behavioral remedy. CBT focuses on altering an individual’s detrimental thought patterns, behaviors, and emotional responses.

For her work, she acquired a 2025 Robotics Medal from MassRobotics, which acknowledges feminine researchers advancing robotics. The Boston-based nonprofit supplies robotics startups with a workspace, prototyping amenities, mentorship, and networking alternatives.

When receiving the award on the ceremony in Boston, Matarić was overcome with pleasure, she says.

“I’ve been very lucky to be honored with a number of awards, which I’m grateful for. However there was one thing very particular about getting the MassRobotics medal, as a result of I knew at the least half the folks within the room,” she says. “Everybody was simply smiling, and there was an excellent sense of affection.”

Seeing herself as an engineer

Matarić grew up in Belgrade, Serbia. Her father was an engineer, and her mom was a author. After her father died when she was 16, Matarić and her mom moved to the United States.

She credit her father for igniting her curiosity in engineering, and her uncle who labored as an aerospace engineer for introducing her to laptop science.

Matarić says she didn’t take into account herself an engineer till she joined USC’s school, since she all the time had labored in laptop science.

“Looking back, I’ve all the time been an engineer,” Matarić says. “However I didn’t set out particularly pondering of myself as one—which is simply one of many many issues I wish to convey to younger folks: You don’t all the time must know precisely all the pieces prematurely.”

Maja Matarić and her lab are exploring how socially assistive robots can assist enhance the communication abilities of kids with autism spectrum disorder. National Science Foundation Information

Whereas pursuing her bachelor’s diploma in laptop science on the University of Kansas in Lawrence, she was launched to industrial robotics by a textbook. After incomes her diploma in 1987, she had a chance to proceed her schooling as a graduate scholar at MIT’s AI Lab (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). Throughout her first 12 months, she explored the totally different analysis tasks being performed by school members, she mentioned in a 2010 oral history performed by the IEEE History Center. She met IEEE Life Fellow Rodney Brooks, who was engaged on novel reactive and behavior-based robotic methods. His work so excited her that she joined his lab and performed her grasp’s thesis beneath his tutelage.

Impressed by the best way animals use landmarks to navigate, Matarić developed Toto, the primary navigating behavior-based robotic. Toto used distributed fashions to map the AI Lab constructing the place Matarić labored and plan its path to totally different rooms. Toto used sonar to detect partitions, doorways, and furnishings, in keeping with Matarić’s paper, “The Robotics Primer.”

After incomes her grasp’s diploma in AI and robotics in 1990, she continued to work beneath Brooks as a doctoral scholar, pioneering distributed algorithms that allowed a group of as much as 20 robots to execute complicated duties in tandem, together with trying to find objects and exploring their surroundings.

Matarić earned her Ph.D. in AI and robotics in 1994 and joined Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., as an assistant professor of laptop science. There she based the Interplay Lab, the place she developed autonomous robots that work collectively to perform duties.

Three years later, she relocated to California and joined USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering as an assistant professor in laptop science and neuroscience.

In 2002 she helped to discovered the Heart for Robotics and Embedded Systems (now the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center). The RASC focuses on analysis into human-centric and scalable robotic methods and promotes interdisciplinary partnerships throughout USC.

Matarić’s shift in her analysis got here after she gave delivery to her first baby in 1998. When her daughter was a bit older and requested Matarić why she labored with robots, she needed to have the ability to “say one thing higher than ‘I publish quite a lot of analysis papers,’ or ‘it’s well-recognized,’” she says.

“In academia, you may be in a management function and nonetheless do analysis. It’s a beautiful and essential alternative that lets teachers be on high of our discipline and in addition practice the subsequent era of scholars and assist the subsequent era of college colleagues.”

“Youngsters don’t take into account these good solutions, and so they’re most likely proper,” she says. “This made me understand I used to be able to do one thing totally different. And I actually needed the reply to my daughter’s future query to be, ‘Mommy’s robots assist folks.’”

Matarić and her doctoral scholar David Feil-Seifer introduced a paper defining socially assistive robotics on the 2005 International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics. It was the one paper that talked about serving to folks full duties and be taught abilities by talking with them quite than by performing bodily jobs, she says.

Feil-Seifer is now a professor of laptop science and engineering on the University of Nevada in Reno.

On the identical time, she based the Interaction Lab at USC and made its focus creating robots that present social, quite than bodily, help.

“At this level in my profession journey, I’ve matured to a spot the place I don’t need to just do curiosity-driven analysis alone,” she says. “Loads of what my group and I do in the present day continues to be pushed by curiosity, however it’s answering the query: ‘How can we assist somebody stay a greater life?’”

In 2006 she was promoted to full professor and made the senior affiliate dean for analysis in USC’s Viterbi College of Engineering. In 2012 she turned vice dean for analysis.

“In academia, you may be in a management function and nonetheless do analysis,” she says. “It’s a beautiful and essential alternative that lets teachers be on high of our discipline and in addition practice the subsequent era of scholars and assist the subsequent era of college colleagues.”

Analysis in socially assistive robotics

One of many longest analysis tasks Matarić has led at her Interplay Lab is exploring how socially assistive robots can assist enhance the communication abilities of kids with autism spectrum disorder. ASD is a lifelong neurological situation that impacts the best way folks work together with others, and the best way they be taught. Youngsters with ASD usually battle with social behaviors equivalent to studying nonverbal cues, taking part in with others, and making eye contact.

Matarić and her group developed a robotic, Bandit, that may play video games with a toddler and provides the teen phrases of affirmation. Bandit is 56 centimeters tall and has a humanlike head, torso, and arms. Its head can pan and tilt. The robotic makes use of two FireWire cameras as its eyes, and it has a movable mouth and eyebrows, permitting it to exhibit quite a lot of facial expressions, in keeping with the IEEE Spectrum’s robots guide. Its torso is hooked up to a wheeled base.

The research confirmed that when interacting with Bandit, kids with ASD exhibited social behaviors that had been out of the strange for them, equivalent to initiating play and imitating the robotic.

Matarić and her group additionally studied how the robotic may function a social and cognitive help for elderly folks and stroke sufferers. Bandit was programmed to instruct and inspire customers to carry out day by day motion workouts equivalent to seated aerobics.

Maja Matarić and doctoral scholar Amy O’Connell testing Blossom, which is getting used to check the way it can help college students with anxiousness or melancholy.College of Southern California

Through the years, Matarić’s lab developed different robots together with Kiwi and Blossom. Kiwi, which seemed like an owl, helped kids with ASD be taught social and cognitive abilities, helped inspire aged folks dwelling alone to be extra bodily energetic, and mediated discussions amongst members of the family. Blossom, initially developed at Cornell, was tailored by the Interplay Lab to make it inexpensive and personalizable for people. The robotic is getting used to check the way it can help college students with anxiousness or melancholy to apply cognitive behavioral remedy.

Matarić’s line of analysis started when she discovered that enormous language mannequin (LLM) chatbots had been being promoted to assist folks with mental health struggles, she mentioned in an episode of the AMA Medical News podcast.

“It’s typically not simple to get [an appointment with a] therapist, or there may not be insurance coverage protection,” she mentioned. “These, mixed with the charges of hysteria and melancholy, created an actual want.”

That made the chatbot thought interesting, she says, however she was to see in the event that they had been efficient in contrast with a pleasant robotic equivalent to Blossom.

Matarić and her group used the identical LLMs to energy CBT apply with a chatbot and with Blossom. They ran a two-week research within the USC dorms, the place college students had been randomly assigned to finish CBT workouts day by day with both a chatbot or the robotic. Contributors stuffed out a medical evaluation to measure their psychiatric misery earlier than and after every session.

The research confirmed that college students who interacted with the robotic skilled a major lower of their psychological state, Matarić mentioned within the podcast, and college students who interacted with the chatbot didn’t.

“Becoming a member of an [IEEE] society has an affect, and it may be private. That’s why I like to recommend my college students be a part of the group—as a result of it’s essential to get on the market and get linked.”

She and her group additionally reviewed transcripts of conversations between the scholars and the robotic to judge how properly the LLM responded to the members. They discovered the robotic was more practical than the chatbot, regardless that each had been utilizing the identical mannequin.

Based mostly on these findings, in 2024 Matarić acquired a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a six-week medical trial to discover how efficient a socially assistive robotic could possibly be at delivering CBT apply. The trial, presently underway, additionally is anticipated to check how Blossom may be personalised to adapt to every consumer’s preferences and progress, together with the best way the robotic strikes, which workouts it recommends, and what suggestions it offers.

Through the trial, the 120 college students taking part are carrying Fitbits to check their physiologic responses. The members fill out a medical evaluation to measure their psychiatric misery earlier than and after every session.

Knowledge together with the members’ emotions of regarding the robotic, intrinsic motivation, engagement, and adherence might be assessed by the analysis group, Matarić says.

She says she’s pleased with the graduate college students engaged on this challenge, and seeing them develop as engineers is among the most rewarding components of working in academia.

“Engineers typically don’t anticipate having to work with human research members and needing to know psychology along with the hardcore engineering,” she says. “So the scholars who select to do that analysis are simply fantastic, caring folks.”

Discovering a group at IEEE

Matarić joined IEEE as a graduate scholar in 1992, the 12 months she revealed her first paper in IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. The paper, “Integration of Representation Into Goal-Driven Behavior-Based Robots,” described her work on Toto.

As a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, she says she has gained a group of like-minded folks. She enjoys attending conferences together with the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, which is closest to her discipline of analysis.

Matarić credit IEEE Life Fellow George Bekey, the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, for recruiting her for the USC engineering school place. He knew of her work by her graduate advisor Brooks, who revealed a paper within the journal that launched reactive management and the subsumption structure, which turned the inspiration of a brand new approach to management robots. It’s his most cited paper. Bekey, who was editor in chief on the time, helped information Brooks by the difficult assessment course of. Matarić joined Brooks’s lab at MIT two years after its publication, and her work on Toto constructed on that basis.

“Becoming a member of a society has an affect, and it may be private,” she says. “That’s why I like to recommend my college students be a part of the group—as a result of it’s essential to get on the market and get linked.”