Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Anqi Liu is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of robotics, human-robot interaction, and safe autonomous systems. Her work primarily focuses on enabling robots to understand, predict, and safely collaborate with humans in dynamic environments. A key contribution is her development of predictive inverse optimal control methods, as demonstrated in her highly cited 2015 paper on intent prediction and trajectory forecasting (44 citations), which allows robots to infer human intentions and future behavior for seamless interaction. Liu has also advanced the field of human-robot interaction by integrating cognitive emotional regulation models, enabling robots to respond to human emotional states through facial expressions and behaviors. In safety-critical domains, she introduced chance-constrained trajectory optimization for safe exploration and learning of nonlinear systems, a foundational approach for deploying learning-based control in real-world settings without compromising safety. More recently, Liu has ventured into surgical robotics with SurgicAI, a hierarchical platform for fine-grained surgical policy learning and benchmarking, and conversational AI with work on interruption handling. Her research consistently bridges theoretical rigor with practical deployment, making her a leading voice in creating robots that are both intelligent and trustworthy.