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About

Kayla Matheus is a robotics researcher whose work spans manipulation benchmarking, socially assistive robotics, and human-robot interaction. Her early foundational contribution, "Benchmarking Grasping and Manipulation: Properties of the Objects of Daily Living" (2010), established a rigorous framework for evaluating robotic manipulation using everyday domestic objects, earning 91 citations and becoming an important reference in the robotics community. Her research has since evolved toward the intersection of social robotics and mental health, where she has made particularly notable strides. Matheus is the lead developer of Ommie, a socially assistive robot designed to guide users through deep breathing exercises for anxiety reduction — a project documented across multiple publications that together demonstrate her commitment to translating clinical behavioral interventions into accessible robotic tools. Her 2025 review of long-term human-robot interaction studies, synthesizing over 120 studies across two decades, reflects her growing influence in understanding how humans engage with robots over time. With expertise spanning design methodology, physiological sensing, and HRI evaluation, Matheus represents a researcher thoughtfully bridging engineering rigor with real-world human wellbeing, making her work increasingly relevant as social robotics moves into mental health applications.