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About

Iman Awaad is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher whose work sits at the intersection of autonomous systems, cognitive robotics, and adaptive planning. Her research focuses on enabling robots to reason flexibly about their environments — particularly through the lens of affordance-based planning, where robots identify and exploit opportunities in uncertain or changing conditions to accomplish their goals. Her most cited work, "The Role of Functional Affordances in Socializing Robots" (2015, 35 citations), explores how robots can interpret and leverage environmental cues to interact more naturally with humans, while her affordance-based planning framework offers a principled approach to adaptive problem-solving under uncertainty. Awaad has also made significant contributions to the robotics competition community through her involvement in the EU-funded RoCKIn project, which advanced cognitive robotics benchmarking in both home and industrial settings. Her earlier work on XPERSim laid groundwork for robot learning through experimentation, and her later research on integrating classical planning with real autonomous mobile robots bridges theoretical AI and practical deployment. Across her career, Awaad has consistently addressed the challenge of making robots more robust, adaptable, and capable of operating meaningfully in real-world domestic and industrial environments.