Alyssa Kubota

I am developing robots to deliver an existing clinical intervention to people with cognitive impairments at home. Over the past several years, I developed CARMEN (Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation), which administers compensatory cognitive training (CCT) to people with cognitive impairments. I am engaging with stakeholders to co-design and evaluate these systems.

In healthcare contexts, it is critical that end users, clinicians, and family members are able to program robots without advanced skills in robotics or programming. Thus, I developed JESSIE (Just Express Specifications, Synthesize, and Interact), a robotic system which enables novice programmers to program social robots by expressing high-level specifications and control synthesis approaches. JESSIE is open source to support reproducibility in robotics.

Through this project, we explored multi-human, multi-robot collaboration in safety-critical environments such as emergency departments and manufacturing settings. These environments contain privacy-sensitive information, so placing robots with visual sensors in these areas may introduce security and privacy concerns. However, robots still need the capability to perceive and understand activity in these environments in order to interact meaningfully. Therefore, we explored the integration of non-visual wearable sensors with machine learning algorithms in order to perform human activity recognition and model workflow.

While working together with members of the surrounding community, I developed a “walking school bus” routing program designed to help students safely and easily meet to walk to school together. The program integrates Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps APIs to automatically determine where students should meet to minimize travel time for students and parents. By comparing expected travel times with and without the program, I found that this program would have many benefits: it reduces the time parents spend driving their children to school, helps improve the health of students who participate, and reduces traffic and thereby air pollution around the school.