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About

Pooja Moolchandani is a robotics researcher focused on making human-robot interaction more natural, intuitive, and socially acceptable. Her work spans three key areas: designing touch-based communication, developing dialogue systems for collaborative navigation, and creating intent recognition for dynamic environments. In her influential 2020 study on human-robot patting touch, Moolchandani systematically examined how motion parameters affect user acceptance, laying essential groundwork for integrating physical touch into home and service robotics. Her 2017 development of a Wizard-of-Oz interface for collecting human-robot dialogue data has been equally impactful, providing a foundational tool for building natural language navigation systems. Moolchandani’s 2018 evaluation of robot behavior in response to natural language commands further advanced human-robot teaming by identifying action variations that align with user expectations. She also contributed the ScoutBot dialogue system, which enables collaborative exploration through unconstrained spoken commands. With her 2021 work on hierarchical intent recognition for rapid motions in unstructured environments, Moolchandani continues to push boundaries in making robots responsive partners in dynamic, real-world settings. Her research, cited across multiple studies, is shaping the future of socially aware, communicative robots.