Vasant Srinivasan

About

Vasant Srinivasan is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), with a focus on social robotics, proxemics, and robot communication in high-stakes environments. His most influential work, "Help Me Please" (133 citations), fundamentally advanced how robots can effectively request assistance from humans, demonstrating through large-scale experiments that strategic linguistic framing dramatically improves help-seeking success. Srinivasan's research on social gaze established a novel behavioral framework mapping social context to head, eye, and body patterns, synthesizing eight major studies to create a foundational reference architecture for socially-aware robotic gaze generation. He made significant contributions to proxemic scaling functions, developing and empirically validating autonomous methods for robots to adjust physical movements based on human proximity—work that directly informs how robots navigate social spaces. Notably, Srinivasan applied his expertise to disaster response, conducting field exercises where telepresence robots interacted with trapped victims, and medical scenarios using social telepresence robots for search and rescue. His Survivor Buddy project produced an open-source toolkit exploring voice in HRI, enabling multiple controllers to communicate through a single synthetic voice. With over 280 total citations across his corpus, Srinivasan's work bridges fundamental HRI theory with life-saving practical applications.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Help Me Please

   133 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Responses to robot social roles and social role framing

   53 citations · 2011
3. 3
   Evaluation of Proxemic Scaling Functions for Social Robotics

   29 citations · 2014
4. 4
   A survey of social gaze

   26 citations · 2011
5. 5
   Interacting with trapped victims using robots

   17 citations · 2013
6. 6
   Evaluation of Head Gaze Loosely Synchronized With Real-Time Synthetic Speech for Social Robots

   7 citations · 2014
7. 7
   A proxemic-based HRI testbed

   5 citations · 2012
8. 8
   A Reference Architecture for Social Head Gaze Generation in Social Robotics

   5 citations · 2015
9. 9
   Medical Field Exercise With a Social Telepresence Robot

   4 citations · 2016
10. 10
    A toolkit for exploring the role of voice in human-robot interaction

    4 citations · 2011

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links