Papers
5
Total Citations
26
H-Index
3
About
Padraig Higgins is a researcher at the forefront of human-robot interaction (HRI), pioneering the use of virtual reality (VR) as a powerful tool for robot learning. His work centers on bridging the gap between simulation and reality, with a specific focus on grounded language acquisition and data generation for embodied agents. Higgins’s key contributions include the development of a VR-based simulator that enables robots to observe and learn from human interactions in photorealistic, rigged avatars. This approach addresses a critical bottleneck in robotics: the scarcity of high-quality, multimodal training data for tasks like object deixis and collaborative building. His most cited work, "A Simulator for Human-Robot Interaction in Virtual Reality" (8 citations), lays the foundation for this paradigm, while his spoken language dataset (6 citations) provides a vital resource for speech-based grounded learning. By demonstrating that VR can effectively replicate real-world HRI scenarios, Higgins is not only advancing the field of sample-efficient learning but also making it possible to train robots for human-centric spaces without the prohibitive cost of real-world data collection.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1A Simulator for Human-Robot Interaction in Virtual Reality8 citations · 2021
- 2
- 3Towards Making Virtual Human-Robot Interaction a Reality6 citations · 2021
- 4A Collaborative Building Task in VR Vs. Reality3 citations · 2024
- 5Head Pose for Object Deixis in VR-Based Human-Robot Interaction3 citations · 2022