"Toward Human-Robot Symbiosis: Interactive Control for Mobility, Collaboration, and Rehabilitation"

Human-robot symbiosis is emerging as a transformative paradigm with applications across mobility, rehabilitation, manufacturing, and assistive technologies. Achieving such symbiosis requires robots not only to execute tasks but also to understand, predict, and adapt to human intent, physiology, and the environment. Despite recent progress, several knowledge gaps remain. Robust methods are needed to predict human movement intentions in real time, to model and control locomotion over uncertain and dynamic terrains, and to design robotic systems capable of safe and effective physical collaboration with humans. In this talk, results will be presented addressing these challenges. For prosthetic applications, a human-in-the-loop algorithm has been designed to predict surface transitions from biomechanical features, allowing robotic lower-limb prostheses to anticipate environmental changes and maintain stability.

Panos Artemiadis received his Ph.D. degree in ME from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the ME Department at MIT, and then joined Arizona State University, where he served as Assistant Professor and later Associate Professor. In 2019, he joined the ME Department at the University of Delaware, where he is currently Professor and Graduate Program Director of the Master of Science in Robotics program. He is the Director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control (HORC) Lab.