Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Qiaoyue Yang is a leading researcher at the intersection of human–robot interaction (HRI) and industrial manufacturing, where she pioneers methods to make collaborative robots more intuitive, adaptive, and socially aware. Her core research areas include physical ergonomics, engagement prediction, proxemics, and user-centered robot teaching. Yang’s most influential work, “Influence of task decision autonomy on physical ergonomics and robot performances” (2022, 6 citations), demonstrated that empowering human operators with decision-making autonomy in collaborative tasks can simultaneously improve user welfare and robot performance—a breakthrough for overcoming barriers to human–robot collaboration adoption. She has also advanced real-time interaction quality through her 2025 paper on eye contact-based engagement prediction (3 citations), enabling robots to detect declining user interest early for more natural exchanges. Her experimental work on learning human–robot proxemics models (2025, 3 citations) provides data-driven frameworks for robots to respect social norms, while her 2024 study on simplifying robot grasping with a novel user grasp metric (3 citations) offers non-experts a teaching approach to configure manufacturing robots. With a growing citation record and a focus on democratizing robotics, Yang’s contributions are shaping a future where robots seamlessly integrate into human-centered industrial environments.