AIBRIEF
The National Science Foundation is funding a five year, $30M center, led by UT Austin with Yale and four other universities, to study how people and robots reshape each other over years of coexistence.
Most human-robot interaction research is measured in minutes or hours. A new five-year, $30 million National Science Foundation center is funding the harder question: what changes when a robot stays in someone's life for years, and whether the technology on hand has earned that bet.
The Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation is a five-year, $30 million National Science Foundation center that brings together 39 researchers. Sen. John Cornyn's office confirmed the $30 million UT Austin award, and the center is one of three new NSF Science and Technology Centers in a $90 million slate covered by The Robot Report. The frame is what researchers call co-adaptation: how robots and the people who live and work alongside them reshape each other over months and years, not single interactions.
Industry partners and NVIDIA are named alongside the universities. The Yale team spans computer science, cognitive science, mechanical engineering, psychology, sociology, and public health. The federal funder has placed its bet on a time horizon most human-robot interaction research does not measure. Whose problems the center ends up solving, and whether the assistive robots it wants to study for years exist in the homes it would study them in, are the open questions.