Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Jinhan Lee is a roboticist whose research lies at the intersection of human-robot interaction, autonomous navigation, and machine perception. His work on turn-taking in human-robot dialogue, particularly in the paper “Simon plays Simon says” (43 citations), established foundational insights into how robots can achieve natural, temporally-coordinated communication with humans. Lee also made significant contributions to motion planning, developing cost-based RRT algorithms for outdoor environments (38 citations) that enable robots to navigate challenging, dynamic terrains more effectively than traditional methods. A key theme in his research is contingency detection—the ability of a robot to perceive and respond to human social cues. His vision-based and multi-cue approaches to detecting contingent responses (22 and 7 citations) have advanced the field of socially-aware robotics, allowing machines to recognize when a human is deliberately interacting with them. Lee’s work on task-relevant object learning (6 citations) further demonstrates his commitment to building robots that can learn efficiently from demonstration by focusing on what matters. With a career spanning both foundational theory and practical integration—as highlighted in his work on mobile manipulation (5 citations)—Lee’s research continues to shape how robots perceive, plan, and interact in human-centered environments.