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About

Mike Fraser is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, nonverbal communication, and robot safety. He is perhaps best known for his influential investigations into cooperative and co-verbal gestures in humanoid robots, exploring how robots can leverage the same gestural cues that underpin natural human pro-social interaction to communicate more effectively with people. His papers on cooperative gestures have collectively accumulated over 160 citations, underscoring the field's appetite for this research direction. Fraser has also made significant contributions to spoken dialogue systems for mobile robots, as demonstrated by his work on the Godot platform, which explored bidirectional information flow between navigation and symbolic dialogue — a paper that has garnered nearly 60 citations. Beyond interaction design, Fraser has addressed the critical challenge of safety in personal robotics, proposing safety-driven control architectures that separate deliberative and reactive behaviors to reduce risk during physical human-robot interaction. Across his career, he has consistently pushed toward robots that are not only technically capable but socially fluent and safe — qualities increasingly essential as robots enter everyday human environments.