Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Santosh Balajee Banisetty is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, socially-aware navigation, and robot cognition. His research focuses on enabling robots to understand, respect, and navigate complex human social norms — a challenge that spans both technical and psychological dimensions. Banisetty's most influential contribution is his development of the Perceived Social Intelligence (PSI) scale, a rigorous measurement framework that quantifies how humans assess robot social competence by integrating psychological theories of beliefs, desires, and intentions with HRI principles. This work has garnered 67 citations and has become a foundational tool for evaluating social robot behavior. Complementing this, his extensive body of work on socially-aware navigation — spanning non-linear multi-objective optimization, proxemics modeling, and context-sensitive rule reasoning — has collectively shaped how mobile robots move respectfully alongside people, accumulating dozens of additional citations across multiple publications. Beyond navigation, Banisetty has tackled multi-robot task allocation, natural language-based task learning, and moral cognition in robot architectures, reflecting a remarkably broad vision for socially intelligent autonomous systems. His research consistently bridges engineering rigor with humanistic sensitivity, making him a distinctive voice in the growing field of socially assistive robotics.