Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Jumana Abu-Khalaf is a robotics researcher whose work spans mechanical design, computer vision, and human-robot interaction. Her research focuses on developing intelligent robotic systems that can perceive, navigate, and interact with their environments, with particular emphasis on assistive technologies and autonomous navigation. Her most notable contribution is the mechanical design of a cable-driven upper limb exoskeleton prototype actuated by pneumatic rubber muscles (2017, 7 citations), which represents an innovative approach to assistive robotics. She has also made significant contributions to mobile robot navigation through her work on reactive navigation algorithms using Nearness Diagrams (2018, 6 citations), and to computer vision with her Segment Any Object Model (SAOM) for multi-class multi-instance segmentation (2024, 4 citations). Her diverse portfolio includes work on six-degree-of-freedom robotic arms for explosive ordnance disposal (2015, 4 citations), indoor semantic scene understanding using 2D-3D fusion (2021, 3 citations), and artificial empathy classification for human-robot interaction (2023, 2 citations). Her recent work on StratXplore for vision-language navigation (2024) and PanoSCU for panoramic indoor scene understanding (2025) demonstrates her continued focus on advancing autonomous robotic perception and navigation capabilities.