Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

John Hosking is a leading researcher in end-user robot programming, with a particular focus on making social and educational robots accessible to novices. His work bridges human-computer interaction and software engineering, pioneering tools that lower the barrier to robot programming. Hosking’s most influential contribution is the development of **Ruru**, a spatial and interactive visual programming language for novice robot programming (2011, 35 citations), which demonstrated how tangible, immediate outcomes can make programming more intuitive for beginners. He has since driven a research agenda on **social robot programming**, exploring how to design APIs at appropriate abstraction levels. His 2016 paper on this topic (26 citations) and his 2014 work on a human-centric API (11 citations) are foundational, showing that effective social robot tools must balance high-level expressiveness with low-level control. Hosking also conducted seminal research on how people naturally describe robot behaviour (2012, 8 citations), analyzing 19 project reports to create an ontology of critical concepts for end-user environments. His work is widely cited for its practical, human-centered approach, directly influencing the design of modern robot programming platforms used in education and social robotics.