INFO 5356-030: Introduction to Human-Robot Interaction
Cornell Tech
Fall 2026, 2025, 2024, 2022
Course Description
Robots are making their way into our everyday lives, working across many applications, including in people’s homes, healthcare, and retail settings. As robotic systems become more integrated into our lives, they must be designed to be useful, functional, and socially acceptable; however, this remains a key challenge for the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). This course covers core computational, engineering, social, robot design, and prototyping; as well as important topics in HRI–including, research methods, anthropomorphism, robot perception of people, human perception of robots, generative AI methods, and social signal processing – recognition and synthesis for HRI. This course endows on the end-to-end HRI pipeline to understand the impacts of robot design, algorithms, model training, and evaluation procedures including qualitative and quantitative methods and analyses. The final project challenges student teams to develop an interactive robotic game for K-12 students, demonstrating an understanding of robot design, prototyping, development, and iterative assessment of human-human and human-robot interactions. After taking this course, students will have the critical thinking skills to propose, introduce, and execute human-robot interaction studies, including tightly coupled software and hardware constraints on HRI to produce scientifically sound outcomes. Furthermore, students can expect to learn about seminal research in HRI, gain hands-on experience with physical tabletop robots, and implement systems for real-time interaction with people.
Prerequisites: CS 2800 or equivalent, experience programming in Python, or permission of the instructor.
Reading: Bartneck, Christoph, Tony Belpaeme, Friederike Eyssel, Takayuki Kanda, Merel Keijsers, and Selma Šabanović. Human-robot interaction: An introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Introduction to HRI Course
Learning Outcomes
-
Program simulated and physical tabletop robots to perform complex verbal and non-verbal behaviors in HRI scenarios.
-
Engage and negotiate robot design and prototyping processes (e.g., laser cutting and 3D printing) to build new robot embodiments and behaviors given time and resource constraints.
-
Understand important topics in HRI and the impact of robots in real-world settings.
-
Design a gamified user study to measure and evaluate the robot’s effectiveness and user perceptions of it during deployment with K-12 students.
Introduction to HRI Course
Course Schedule
Introduction to HRI Course (2026)
Robotic Platform for Teaching
REACHY MINI (WIRELESS)
1.5kg
Mass
The Reachy Mini robot, ‘an expressive companion robot designed for human interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation’, was recently released in 2025. With growing interests in using Reachy Mini in robotic research and development, students in this course work with state-of-the-art hardware and software, with modular robotic parts for customization. Reachy is a wireless tabletop robot with various hardware for embodied AI interaction, including speakers, microphones, camera, and on-board computer. The robot engages in speech, gesture, and gaze cues in interactions. The robot is easily programmable in Python, an accessible programming language for most developers.
Introduction to HRI Course (2025-2022)
Robotic Platform for Teaching
TURTLEBOT4
9kg
Payload Capacity
The HRI course utilized the TurtleBot 4 platform that is built on the iRobot® Create 3 educational robot – a sturdy mobile base that provides an array of intelligent sensors for accurate localization and positioning with a speed up to .3 m/s. The Create 3 has a standalone Robot Operating 2 interface and unlike previous TurtleBots, it includes integrated batteries and a charging dock.
Introduction to HRI Course
Final Projects
We organized a K-12 event in collaboration with the Cornell Tech K-12 initiative team including Diane Levitt, Sophie Lachez, and Meg Ray. 50 NYC Dock Street School students from predominantly underserved communities participated in a 3-hour event. Students in the HRI course demonstrated cumulative knowledge at this event including programming the robot to perform complex behaviors, designing and prototyping a robotic embodiment to capture the role the robot plays in the game, demonstrating their robot with four groups of middle school students, and administering study surveys after games to evaluate how the participants perceived their robot.
Dr. Robot
The robot advances through a map of the human body when participants correctly respond to questions about the human body in a web-based interface, inspired by the game 'Operation'.
Mario’s Coin Quest
The robot moves left or right at based on 3D red and green blocks on the ground, and collects coins along the way. The player with the most coins wins!
Pong Soccer
The blue and yellow teams throw balls into the blue and yellow side of the soccer ball to make the robot advance to their goal.
Rat Roulette
The robot splits to select a number at a fixed probability and navigates to the participant standing at the selected number and color (red and black) to give them a block of cheese.
RoboSketch
The robot follows a participant to draw a shape on the ground.
Red Light, Green Light
The robot says ‘red light’ and participants stop moving, and it says ‘green light’ for participants to move forward. If you move during ‘red light’, you are out!
Cat and Mouse
The robot rotates and stops randomly. If you are caught in front of the robot, you are out!
Time's Up!
The robot plays music and participant teams guess where the song comes from using flash cards. The robot detects QR codes to recognize correct or incorrect robot music references. Participants that select the correct music references win!
Credits: We thank Niti Parkih, the Cornell Tech MakerLab Director, for providing educational tools for digital fabrication, and William Leon for creating 3D models of the final project robots.
