Rohan Prinja

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Rohan Prinja is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher whose work sits at the compelling intersection of social robotics, human-computer interaction, and affective computing. His research focuses primarily on developing intelligent navigation algorithms that enable robots to move safely and naturally among people by understanding human psychology and emotion. Prinja's most notable contributions center on emotion-aware robot navigation. His 2019 paper, "The Emotionally Intelligent Robot" (17 citations), introduced a pioneering real-time algorithm that estimates pedestrians' emotional states using Bayesian inference, convolutional neural networks, and the PAD (Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance) emotional model — enabling robots to anticipate and adapt to human behavior dynamically. He extended this work in 2020 with a multimodal approach incorporating both facial expressions and movement trajectories for richer emotional understanding (14 citations). An earlier contribution, "SocioSense" (2017), laid foundational groundwork by integrating personality trait theory and Bayesian learning into robot path planning, enabling longer-term behavioral prediction in crowded environments. Together, these works represent a coherent and progressively sophisticated research agenda, collectively accumulating 36 citations. Prinja's scholarship is particularly valuable for researchers working on human-robot interaction, autonomous systems, and socially assistive technologies.