CORE Robotics Lab

The ESTHER teams gives a demo at Avant South tech summit at Georgia Tech.
Lab social event at Tec Rec Bowling Alley.
Zulfiqar Zaidi, Nathaniel Belles, Arjun Krishna, and Kin Man Lee, from the CORE Robotics Wheelchair Tennis Robot (WTR) Team, demonstrating a robot tennis strike to local boy scouts during an outreach event.
Zulfiqar Zaidi, Nathaniel Belles, Arjun Krishna, and Kin Man Lee, from the CORE Robotics Wheelchair Tennis Robot (WTR) Team, demonstrating a robot table tennis strike to local boy scouts during an outreach event.
Georgia Tech Researchers (Zac Letian Chen, Rohan Paleja, and Matthew Gombolay) Teach a Robot How to Improve at Ping Pong on Its Own
Michael giving a demonstration of the Sawyer robot during CSEd Week with the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing at Georgia Tech.
Matthew Gombolay and his mentor, Dr. Sung-Hyun Son of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, receiving the R&D 100 Award at Waldorf Astoria in Orlando, FL.
Matthew Gombolay giving keynote for the Southeastern Robotics Symposium.
Finishing with plenty time to spare, the lab had a successful social event at the Time to Escape Experience!
Zac Letian Chen, Esmaeil Seraj, Andrew Silva, Nina Moorman, and Matthew Gombolay at ICRA'22

Welcome

The Cognitive Optimization and Relational (CORE) Robotics laboratory develops advanced algorithmic techniques to enable robots to collaborate with human teammates. The lab’s work is founded upon the vision for moving beyond thinking of robots as tools that must be manually controlled towards a paradigm in which robots can learn through interaction and experience how to be effective peers for human professionals in healthcare, manufacturing, and search & rescue. Algorithmic techniques include deep reinforcement learning, mathematical programming, and distributed control theory. Additionally, we conduct human subject experiments to understand how to design effective algorithms and to evaluate the contribution of our computational techniques.

Recent News

2024

May 9, 2024- Manisha Natarajan was an invited speaker for the ARMS Workshop and presented at the main conference for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2024 in New Zealand!
Apr 22, 2024- Zac Chen successfully defended his PhD proposal on “Personalized, Safe, and Multimodal Robot Learning from Human Interactions”. Congratulations Zac!
Apr 20, 2024- Matthew Gombolay, Manisha Natarajan, Zac Chen, and Julianna Schalkwyk presented their latest work during a visit to the STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation in Boston, MA.
Apr 18, 2024- Erin Botti officially passed her PhD Dissertation Defense on “Improving Learning from Demonstration in Real-World Scenarios!”
Mar 12, 2024- Huge congratulations to Matthew Gombolay for his promotion to Associate Professor with tenure!
Mar 11, 2024- Congrats to Zac Chen on his paper entitled “Enhancing Safety in Learning from Demonstration Algorithms via Control Barrier Function Shielding” being accepted to Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2024.
Feb 27, 2024- Matthew Gombolay received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award on “Democratizing Robot Learning for Assistive Robotics in MCI.”
Jan 18, 2024- Manisha Natarajan successfully defended her PhD proposal on “Methods and Models for Robots to Support Variable Human Task Performance”. Congratulations Manisha!

2023

Dec 19, 2023- Matthew Gombolay was invited on CNN to talk about issues with police departments using facial recognition technology.
Dec 8, 2023- Sean Ye successfully defended his PhD proposal on “Modeling, Predicting, and Tracking Adversarial Targets in Sparse, Partially Observable Environments”. Congratulations Sean!
Oct 25, 2023- Manisha Natarajan and Chunyue Xue had their paper entitled “Mixed-Initiative Human-Robot Teaming under Suboptimality” nominated for “Best Paper Award” at AAAI 2023!
Oct 5, 2023- The work of several lab members resulted in three paper presentations, a demonstration, a keynote, and a workshop at IROS2023!
Aug 23, 2023- Matthew Gombolay is a speaker at the 35th Atlanta Robotics Meetup with the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) & Cosmos Robotics
Aug 21, 2023- Warm welcome to our newest PhD students: Julianna Schalkwyk and Minwoo Cho!
Aug 16, 2023- Rohan Paleja passed his Ph.D. Dissertation Defense, congrats!
July 15, 2023- Erin Botti received the P.E.O. Sisterhood Scholar Award!
July 11, 2023- Nina Moorman had her paper nominated for “Best Student Paper Award” at RSS 2023!
Jun 12, 2023- Andrew Silva officially passed his Ph.D. Dissertation Defense!
May 29, 2023- Matthew Gombolay & Rohan Paleja helped organize an Explainable Robots Workshop at ICRA!
Apr 24, 2023 – Esmaeil Seraj officially passed his Ph.D. Dissertation Defense!
Apr 23, 2023 – Nina Moorman had her paper entitled “Investigating the Impact of Experience on a User’s Ability to Perform Hierarchical Abstraction” accepted to Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Conference and Mariah Schrum was accepted to their Pioneers Workshop. Looking forward to the presentation in South Korea!
Feb 28, 2023 – Mariah Schrum officially passed her Ph.D. Dissertation Defense!
Feb 21, 2023- Matthew Gombolay is a presenter for the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Virtual Expert Meeting on Future Technology for Workplace Training.

2022

Dec 15, 2022- Matthew Gombolay will be speaking at the CoRL Workshop in New Zealand on Aligning Robot Representations with Humans. You can check out his presentation on Youtube, starting at timestamp 1:42:00.
Dec 2, 2022- Matthew Gombolay is giving a keynote talk at NeurIPS Workshop on Progress and Challenges in Building Trustworthy Embodied AI, check out the video here.
Nov 17, 2022 – Matthew Gombolay will be giving a keynote at AI-HRI 2022!
Oct 27, 2022 – We are co-organizing the Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Systems workshop at IROS 2022 in Japan! This workshop aims to bring together multi-agent systems experts and researchers from different disciplines, ranging from robotics, machine learning, and game theory, to share the recent advances, open problems, and challenges in their respective fields and brainstorm research thrusts that will lead us towards revolutionary advances in multi-agent systems.
Sept 10, 2022 – Our lab had three papers accepted to the CoRL. Looking forward to their presentations in New Zealand!
May 2022 – Mariah Scrum, Andrew Silva, Rohan Paleja, and Esmaeil Seraj each successfully completed his/her proposal. Congrats!
May 2, 2022 – Laura successfully completed her defense. Congratulations Laura!
Mar 10, 2022 – Congrats to Mariah, Erin, and Nina on their best technical paper award at HRI! Their paper is titled “MIND MELD: Personalized Meta-Learning for Robot-Centric Imitation Learning.”

2021

Jun 17, 2021 – We are organizing the Robotics for People (R4P): Perspectives on Interaction, Learning, and Safety Workshop at RSS 2021. By bridging the HRI, ML, and MP communities, this workshop aims to create a road map for developing safer and smarter robots.
Jun 17, 2021 – Congrats to Esi and Zac on their paper entitled “A Hierarchical Coordination Framework for Joint Perception-Action Tasks in Composite Robot Teams” being accepted to IEEE T-RO.
May 29, 2021 – Congrats to Eric and Manisha on their paper entitled “Coordinating Human-Robot Teams with Dynamic and Stochastic Task Proficiencies” being accepted to IEEE T-HRI.
Mar 10, 2021 – Congrats to Pradyumna and Andrew on their paper entitled “Towards a Comprehensive Understanding and Accurate Evaluation of Societal Biases in Pre-Trained Transformers” being accepted to NAACL’21.
Jan 24, 2021 – Congrats to Esi on his paper entitled “Adaptive Leader-Follower Control for Multi-Robot Teams with Uncertain Network Structure.” being accepted to ACC’21.

2020

Dec 17, 2020 – Congrats to Yaru and Rohan on their paper entitled “Multi-Agent Graph-Attention Communication and Teaming” being accepted to AAMAS’21.
Nov 16, 2020 – Congrats to Zac and Rohan on receiving a Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) Best Paper Nomination on their paper entitled “Learning from Suboptimal Demonstration via Self-Supervised Reward Regression”.
Sept 25, 2020 – Congrats to Zac and Rohan on their paper entitled “Learning from Suboptimal Demonstration via Self-Supervised Reward Regression” being accepted to CoRL’20.
Sept 25, 2020 – Congrats to Rohan, Andrew, and Zac on their paper entitled “Interpretable and Personalized Apprenticeship Scheduling: Learning Interpretable Scheduling Policies from Heterogeneous User Demonstrations” being accepted to NeurIPS’20.
Jun 19, 2020 – Zheyuan successfully defended his PhD proposal. Congratulations Zheyuan!
Jun 2, 2020 – Zheyuan‘s paper entitled “Learning scheduling policies for multi-robot coordination with graph attention networks” is accepted to IEEE RA-L. Awesome job Zheyuan!
May 15, 2020 – Andrew will be joining Apple and Van will be working at NASA as Graduate Interns during this upcoming Summer 2020. Awesome! Congrats guys!
May 15, 2020 – Manisha, Zac, and Leng graduated with their Master’s degrees from GT. Kudos to you all on your amazing achievements! Manisha and Zac will continue their work at CORE Robotics Lab as PhD students, starting Fall’20 and Leng will be hunting jobs. Good Luck out there!
May 5, 2020 – Zheyuan‘s paper entitled “Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Scalable Multi-Robot Scheduling with Temporospatial Constraints” is accepted to RSS’20. Amazing job Zheyuan!
Feb 13, 2020 – Esi‘s ACC’20 paper is selected among the top 5 as a finalist for Best Student Paper Award. Kudos to you Esi!
Jan 16, 2020 – Esi‘s paper entitled “Coordinated Control of UAVs for Human-Centered Active Sensing of Wildfires” is accepted to ACC’20. Nice job Esi!
Jan 2020 – Mariah, Michael and Leng have a co-first-authored a paper entitled “Four Years in Review: Statistical Practices of Likert Scales in Human-Robot Interaction Studies” which is accepted for presentation in alt. HRI 2020. Congrats guys!
Jan 6, 2020 – Andrew‘s paper entitled “Optimization Methods for Interpretable Differentiable Decision Trees in Reinforcement Learning” is accepted to AISTATS. Congrats Andrew!

2019

Nov 29, 2019 – Zac‘s paper entitled “Joint Goal and Strategy Inference across Heterogeneous Demonstrators via Reward Network Distillation” is accepted to HRI’20. Great job Zac!
Nov 29, 2019 – Manisha‘s paper entitled “Effects of Anthropormorphism and Accountability on Trust in Human Robot Interaction” is accepted to HRI’20. Amazing job Manisha!
Nov 2019 – Mariah‘s paper entitled “When Your Robot Breaks: Active Learning During Plant Failure” is accepted to IEEE RA-L. She is also accepted to present her work in ICRA’20. Well done Mariah!
Dec 18, 2019 – Laura successfully defended her PhD proposal. Congratulations Laura!
Oct 11, 2019 – Matthew Gombolay gave keynote for the Southeastern Robotics Symposium.
Oct 1, 2019 – Nakul Gopalan joins the lab. Welcome!
Sept 13, 2019 – Matthew Gombolay receives NASA Early Career Fellowship on “Scaling the Power of the Astronaut via Workload-aware Robotic Apprenticeship and Explainable Autonomy”.