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About

Maria Elena Lechuga Redondo is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, affective computing, and nonverbal communication. Her work centers on a particularly nuanced challenge in social robotics: enabling robots to detect, interpret, and respond to human comfortability — the subtle emotional states that signal whether someone feels at ease or wishes to withdraw from an interaction. Lechuga Redondo's most influential contribution is her development of computational frameworks for comfortability recognition from visual nonverbal cues, a line of inquiry she has pursued systematically from her 2019 thesis through increasingly refined studies. Her most-cited paper, "Comfortability Analysis Under a Human–Robot Interaction Perspective" (2023, 10 citations), demonstrates growing recognition of her theoretical framework within the HRI community. Complementary work examines whether robots can actively elicit and modulate different comfortability levels, and how they might repair interaction failures — questions with direct implications for deploying social robots in sensitive real-world contexts such as interviews or caregiving. With a cumulative citation record built across just a few years and a tightly focused research agenda, Lechuga Redondo is establishing herself as a distinctive voice in emotionally intelligent robotics, contributing foundational tools for building robots that are genuinely responsive to human psychological comfort.