Joe Connolly
Papers
6
Total Citations
122
H-Index
5
About
Joe Connolly is a human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher whose work sits at the intersection of social robotics, prosocial behavior, and robot navigation. His most influential contribution, "Prompting Prosocial Human Interventions in Response to Robot Mistreatment" (2020, 67 citations), broke new ground by demonstrating that robots can elicit protective, empathetic responses from humans — extending the study of prosocial behavior into the robotics domain. Building on this theme, Connolly has also examined whether emotional robot responses can actively deter abusive behavior toward machines, raising important ethical questions about human-robot relationships. Beyond social dynamics, Connolly has tackled practical deployment challenges, designing VectorConnect, a teleoperation system aimed at reducing social isolation in children during the COVID-19 pandemic. His work on robot-guided navigation explores how humans naturally follow robots, offering computational models to improve guide-robot effectiveness. More recently, Connolly has investigated how robots can integrate into human conversational groups through appropriate spatial positioning and pose generation — research with direct implications for social robots in public and collaborative settings. With citations spanning robotics, psychology, and human-computer interaction, Connolly represents a researcher thoughtfully bridging technical capability with genuine human social needs.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Prompting Prosocial Human Interventions in Response to Robot Mistreatment67 citations · 2020
- 2Challenges Deploying Robots During a Pandemic18 citations · 2021
- 3Follow The Robot: Modeling Coupled Human-Robot Dyads During Navigation16 citations · 2019
- 4Pose Generation for Social Robots in Conversational Group Formations9 citations · 2022
- 5Preventing Robot Abuse through Emotional Robot Responses8 citations · 2020
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