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About

Marjorie Skubic is a prominent researcher whose work sits at the compelling intersection of human-robot interaction, spatial language processing, and intelligent robot control. Her research has made significant strides in developing intuitive interfaces that allow everyday users to communicate with and direct robotic systems, most notably through sketch-based interaction. Skubic pioneered the use of hand-drawn route maps as control interfaces for mobile robots, enabling novice users to guide robot navigation through natural sketching on PDA devices — work that garnered substantial attention across multiple publications totaling over 300 citations. She has also advanced the field of spatial language understanding, exploring how robots can interpret human descriptions of physical environments to inform navigation decisions. Her contributions extend into affective computing, where she proposed a fuzzy logic model for emotion-driven robot decision-making that captures the inherent uncertainty of emotional states. Additionally, her investigations into Hidden Markov Model-based symbol recognition addressed key challenges in sketch interface robustness. Complementing these efforts, Skubic explored biologically inspired adaptive working memory for robot learning and multi-robot team coordination, reflecting a broad and forward-thinking research vision aimed at making human-robot collaboration more natural and accessible.