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About

Ada V. Taylor is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction, with a focus on social robot navigation and augmented reality for telemanipulation. Her work addresses critical challenges in deploying robots in human-populated environments, particularly in making robot navigation socially aware and intuitive. Taylor’s most cited paper, "Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms" (2024, 59 citations), establishes a foundational framework for fair and consistent evaluation of social navigation systems—a key bottleneck in the field. She also pioneered the use of diminished reality to solve occlusion problems in telemanipulation, as demonstrated in "Diminished Reality for Close Quarters Robotic Telemanipulation" (2020, 19 citations) and "InvisibleRobot" (2019, 7 citations), where she developed methods to make robot bodies transparent to users via head-mounted displays. Her work on observer-aware legibility (2022, 13 citations) further advances robot communication by designing paths that signal intent while staying within a human’s field of view. With over 100 total citations and contributions that bridge evaluation standards and practical interface design, Taylor is shaping how robots navigate and interact alongside people.