Assistant Professor Daniel Szafir relocated to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in fall 2021 and the IRON Lab has officially closed. 

The Interactive Robotics and Novel Technologies (IRON) lab, directed by Assistant Professor Dan Szafir, explores human-centered principles for developing novel sensing, interactive and robotic technologies. Blending methods and techniques from computer science, design, engineering and the social sciences, the lab creates technologies that enable new forms of human assistance in applications, including collaborative work, education and space exploration.

IRON Lab

IRON Lab Website

 

Lab Director

Dan Szafir
Dan Szafir
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill • Former ATLAS faculty member

Associated Researchers

Connor Brooks
Connor Brooks
PhD, Comp Sci '22 • IRON Lab
Computer Science
Nick Conlon in front of an SR-71 Blackbird, a reconnaissance jet once operated by the US Air Force and NASA.
Nick Conlon
PhD Student • IRON Lab
Computer Science
Hooman Hedayati
Hooman Hedayati
PhD, Comp Sci '21
Computer Science
Bryce Ikeda
Bryce Ikeda
PhD student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill • Former PhD student affiliated with the ATLAS Institute
Computer Science
Daniel Koris with a sun hat.
Dan Koris
BS Comp Sci '21
Computer Science
Wyatt Rees
Wyatt Rees
PhD Student • IRON Lab
Computer Science
Midhun Sreekumar Menon
Midhun Sreekumar Menon
NASA Post-Doctoral Associate
ATLAS Institute
Brian Sullivan
Brian Sullivan
Undergraduate Student
Computer Science

Publications

  • Hooman Hedayati, Ryo Suzuki, Daniel Leithinger, Daniel J. Szafir. 2020. PufferBot: Actuated Expandable Structures for Aerial Robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020). DOI: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341088. (Las Vegas, Nevada–Oct. 25-29, 2020) pdf.

  • Hooman Hedayati, Annika Muehlbradt, Daniel J. Szafir and Sean Andrist. 2020. REFORM: Recognizing F-formations for Social Robots.  In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020). (Las Vegas, Nevada–Oct. 25-29, 2020).

  • Hooman Hedayati, Daniel Szafir, and James Kennedy. 2020. Comparing F-Formations Between Humans and On-Screen Agents. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–9. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383015 (Honolulu, Hawaii (virtual) – April 25-30, 2020).

  • Ryo Suzuki, Hooman Hedayati, Clement Zheng, James Bohn, Daniel Szafir, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Mark D Gross, and Daniel Leithinger. 2020. RoomShift: Room-scale Dynamic Haptics for VR with Furniture-moving Swarm Robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 396, 11 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376523  (Honolulu, Hawaii – April 25-30, 2020).
  • Brooks, Connor and Szafir, Daniel. 2019. Building Second-Order Mental Models for Human-Robot Interaction.  In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium Series (AI-HRI '19), ArXiv preprint arXiv:1909.06508. (Washington, DC – Nov. 7-9, 2019). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32117.73444.
  • Daniel Szafir. (2019). Mediating Human-Robot Interactions with Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications and Case Studies (HCII VAMR 2019), pp. 124–149. Orlando, FL. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-21565-1_9
  • Darren Guinness, Annika Muehlbradt, Daniel Szafir, and Shaun K. Kane. 2019. RoboGraphics: Dynamic Tactile Graphics Powered by Mobile Robots. In Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3353804. (Pittsburgh, PA - Oct. 28, 2019). 
  • Steve McGuire, P. Michael Furlong, Terry Fong, Christoffer Heckman, Daniel Szafir,  Simon J. Julier, Nisar Ahmed. Everybody Needs Somebody Sometimes: Validation of Adaptive Recovery in Robotic Space Operations, in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1216-1223, April 2019. DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2019.2894381.
  • M. E. Walker, D. Szafir and I. Rae, "The Influence of Size in Augmented Reality Telepresence Avatars," 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Osaka, Japan, 2019, pp. 538-546. doi: 10.1109/VR.2019.8798152 (Osaka, Japan – March 23-27, 2019).

  • Hooman Hedayati, Daniel Szafir, and Sean Andrist. 2019. Recognizing F-Formations in the Open World. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/hri.2019.8673233 (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).

  • T. Williams, D. Szafir, T. Chakrabortiand E. Phillips. 2019. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interaction (VAM-HRI). In The 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19), pp. 671-672. DOI: 10.1109/HRI.2019.8673207  (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).

  • Williams Tom, Szafir, Daniel, and Chakraborti, Tathagata. 2019. The Reality-Virtuality Interaction Cube: A Framework for Conceptualizing Mixed-Reality Interaction Design Elements for HRI. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19) (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).

  • Connor Brooks and Dan Szafir. 2019. Balanced Information Gathering and Goal-Oriented Actions in Shared Autonomy.  In ACM/IEEE '19: The 14th Annual International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'19), (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019). DOI: 10.1109/HRI.2019.8673192.
  • Michael Walker, Hooman Hedayati and Daniel Szafir. 2019. Robot Teleoperation with Augmented Reality Virtual Surrogates. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '19). (Daegu, South Korea – March 11-14, 2019).
  • Darren Guinness,Annika Muehlbradt, Daniel Szafir, and Shaun K. Kane. 2018. The Haptic Video Player: Using Mobile Robots to Create Tangible Video Annotations. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 203-211. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3279778.3279805  (Tokyo, Japan — Nov. 25 - 28, 2018). 
  • Daniel Prendergast and Daniel Szafir. 2018. Improving Object Disambiguation from Natural Language using Empirical Models. In Proceedings of the 2018on International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 477-485. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3242969.3243025  (Boulder, Colorado — Oct. 16 - 20, 2018).
  • Iuzzolino, Michael L., Michael E. Walker, and Daniel Szafir. "Virtual-to-Real-World Transfer Learning for Robots on Wilderness Trails." In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018). IEEE, 2018. (Madrid, Spain – Oct. 1-5, 2018).
  • Connor Brooks, Madhur Atreya, and Daniel Szafir.2018. Proactive Robot Assistants for Freeform Collaborative Tasks Through Multimodal Recognition of Generic Subtasks. 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2018). DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/iros.2018.8594180 (Madrid, Spain – Oct. 1-5, 2018).
  • S. McGuire, P. M. Furlong, C. Heckman, S. Julier, D. Szafirand N. Ahmed. 2018. Failure is Not an Option: Policy Learning for Adaptive Recovery in Space Operations,  in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 1639-1646, July 2018. DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2018.2801468.

  • Hooman Hedayati, Akriti Kapur, Bradley Hayes and Daniel Szafir. 2018.  Robot Navigation for Space Station Environments, In Robotics: Science and Systems Conference at Carnegie Mellon University. (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania  – June 26-30, 2018).

  • Steve McGuire, Michael Walker, Jamison McGinley, Nisar Ahmed, Daniel Szafir and Torin Clark. 2018. TRAADRE: TRust in Autonomous ADvisors for Robotic Exploration at the Robotics: Science and Systems, In Robotics: Science and Systems, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 26-30, 2018).

  • Hooman Hedayti, Michael Walker, and Daniel Szafir. 2018.  Improving Collocated Teleoperation with Augmented Reality,  In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 78-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171251 (Chicago, IL–March 5-8, 2018) [Runner-up for Best Paper in Design Category].
  • Michael Walker, Hooman Hedayti, Jennifer Lee, Daniel Szafir. 2018. Communicating Robot Motion Intent with Augmented Reality, In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 316-324. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171253  (Chicago, IL–March 5-8, 2018) [Best Paper in Design Category].
  • Tom Williams, Daniel Szafir, Tathagata Chakraborti, and Heni Ben Amor. 2018. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interaction. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 403-404. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3173561 (Chicago, IL—March 5-8, 2018).

Additional publications

In the news

https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2021/student-design-competition/
Assistant Professor Dan Szafir to co-chair the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HR2021)

Dec. 2, 2020

HRI 2021, which will be held virtually March 8-11, is the 16th annual conference for basic and applied human-robot interaction research. Researchers from across the world present their best work to HRI to exchange ideas about the theory, technology, data and science furthering the state-of-the-art in human-robot interaction. The student design competition is open to everyone; the deadline is December 10.

drone with expandable protective cage that deploys based on proximity to solid objects
Pufferfish-inspired robot could improve drone safety

Oct. 20, 2020

Pufferbot is an aerial robot with an expandable protective structure that deploys to encircle the drone and prevent the drone's rotors from coming in contact with obstacles or people.

Photo of PufferBot
PufferBot: A flying robot with an expandable body

Aug. 24, 2020

TechXplore writes about PufferBot, an actuated, expandable structure that can be used to fabricate shape-changing aerial robots.

2020 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems logo
ATLAS research helps define the future of human-computer interaction

May 1, 2020

At a time when the field of human-computer interaction is becoming more important than ever, ATLAS researchers are making substantial contributions, contributing nine papers and two workshops to CHI '20.

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