Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Marian Pohling investigates how humans intuitively interact with intelligent environments, bridging social robotics and smart-home technology. Her work centers on understanding natural, multi-modal communication between naive users and autonomous living spaces. In her highly cited 2016 study, “How to Address Smart Homes with a Social Robot? A Multi-modal Corpus of User Interactions with an Intelligent Environment” (29 citations), she co-created a rich corpus documenting how people spontaneously speak, gesture, and move when engaging a robotic apartment. A companion paper, “Welcome to the Future – How Naïve Users Intuitively Address an Intelligent Robotics Apartment” (28 citations), further reveals the gap between user expectations and system design, providing foundational insights for human-robot interaction. Pohling also contributed to the architectural backbone of smart spaces with “Base Cube One: A Location-Addressable Service-Oriented Smart Environment Framework” (2019), which organizes sensors, actuators, and computing modules into a structured, location-aware service schema. This framework enables scalable, interoperable deployments of intelligent environments. Her research has directly informed the design of more responsive, user-friendly smart homes and continues to shape how robots and environments perceive and respond to natural human behavior.