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About

Jessica R. Cauchard is a pioneering researcher in Human-Drone Interaction (HDI), whose work has fundamentally shaped how we understand and design interactions between humans and autonomous flying robots. Her research spans gesture-based interfaces, emotional communication, drone behavior design, and social robotics, establishing her as one of the foremost authorities in this rapidly evolving field. Cauchard's landmark 2015 study, "Drone & Me," garnered 295 citations by employing Wizard-of-Oz methodology to uncover natural interaction techniques between humans and personal drones — work that laid critical groundwork for the entire HDI field. Building on this foundation, she explored how drones can convey emotion through facial expressions and behavioral cues, recognizing that social acceptance depends on emotional legibility. Her 2016 paper on emotion encoding (119 citations) and "Drone in Love" (60 citations) demonstrate her commitment to making drones genuinely sociable agents. Beyond emotion, Cauchard has contributed innovative interaction tools, including drone.io, a gestural projection interface (59 citations), and FlyMap, reimagining map navigation through aerial robotics. Her broader inquiries into anthropomorphism and affective perception reflect a maturing research agenda asking not just how we interact with drones, but why we relate to them at all — a question with profound implications for the future of human-robot collaboration.