Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Maziar Fooladi Mahani is a leading researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI), trust modeling, and autonomous systems. His work focuses on developing computational frameworks that enable robots to infer, quantify, and adapt to human trust in real-time, a critical challenge for safe and effective human-robot teams. Mahani’s major contributions include the creation of a Bayesian trust inference model for human-multi-robot teams (29 citations), which provides a probabilistic foundation for robots to dynamically adjust their behavior based on a human operator’s trust level. He has also advanced trust-based control strategies, such as a switching impedance controller for cooperative manipulation (8 citations) and a runtime verification framework for multi-quadrotor motion planning with a human-in-the-loop (5 citations). His comprehensive survey on human trust in robots (2023, 18 citations) has become a key reference, synthesizing decades of trust research from organizational studies and automation for the HRI community. By bridging formal verification, control theory, and cognitive modeling, Mahani’s work ensures that autonomous systems can safely and transparently collaborate with humans, paving the way for trustworthy human-autonomy teaming in applications ranging from manufacturing to aerial robotics.