Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Myrthe L. Tielman is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), with a primary focus on building trust, emotional expression, and effective teamwork between humans and autonomous robots. Her foundational work on adaptive emotional expression in robot-child interaction, featuring the Nao robot and cited over 140 times, pioneered models for robots to dynamically adjust their internal arousal and valence based on a partner’s emotional state. She has made critical contributions to understanding trust in HRI, most notably through her highly cited taxonomy of trust-relevant failures and mitigation strategies (93 citations), which systematically categorizes how robot errors impact human trust and identifies pathways for repair. Dr. Tielman’s recent research explores the interplay of interdependence, transparency, and explainable communication in human-robot teams, demonstrating that sharing *what* a robot is doing versus *why* it is doing it has distinct effects on collaboration. Her work on meaningful human control and variable autonomy for firefighting robots addresses pressing ethical and practical challenges in deploying autonomous systems for high-stakes, real-world missions. Through her rigorous, application-driven approach, Tielman is shaping the future of trustworthy, emotionally intelligent, and collaborative robots.