Cody Canning

About

Cody Canning’s research lies at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI) and cognitive neuroergonomics, exploring how robots can communicate more effectively with people and how brain sensing can improve teamwork. His most cited work, “Let me tell you!” (103 citations), investigates how robot appearance, interaction modality, and distance shape the effectiveness of advice-giving strategies—challenging the assumption that human-human communication rules directly apply to HRI. Canning also pioneered the use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in HRI, authoring a foundational survey (34 citations) that established fNIRS as both a brain-robot interface and an evaluation tool for measuring cognitive states during interaction. His research on remote human-robot teams (26 citations) reveals how first-person robot video feeds influence perceptions of robot capabilities, a critical insight for teleoperation and remote collaboration. Additionally, his work on the Brainput BCI system (8 citations) demonstrated that NIRS-based classification of user mental states can dynamically adjust robot autonomy to improve team performance. Canning’s contributions have advanced our understanding of how robots should look, talk, and adapt to humans—bridging social robotics and cognitive neuroscience to create more intuitive, responsive human-robot partnerships.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Let me tell you! investigating the effects of robot communication strategies in advice-giving situations based on robot appearance, interaction modality and distance

   103 citations · 2014
2. 2
   Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy in Human-Robot Interaction

   34 citations · 2013
3. 3
   Investigating human perceptions of robot capabilities in remote human-robot team tasks based on first-person robot video feeds

   26 citations · 2014
4. 4
   Reliability of NIRS-based BCIs

   8 citations · 2014

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links