Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Sogol Balali is a human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher whose work explores the social and practical dimensions of robots operating in everyday human spaces. Her research centers on three key areas: help-seeking robot behavior, privacy in teleoperation, and user expectations of robotic capabilities. Balali’s most impactful contribution is her 2020 paper ""Would You Please Buy Me a Coffee?"" (19 citations), which fundamentally challenges the assumption that robots must be fully autonomous, instead demonstrating that robots can effectively ask humans for help when facing hardware or algorithmic limitations—like an armless robot needing to press an elevator button. This work, along with her semi-ethnographic study on human responses to help-seeker robots (4 citations), reveals that people often respond with delight when robots request assistance, opening new design paradigms for collaborative human-robot systems. Her 2019 study on privacy concerns in robot teleoperation (7 citations) examines how operator personality influences what visual information should be hidden during remote control. More recently, Balali has investigated how everyday experience with computer vision apps like Instagram and Zoom can shape user expectations of robotic capabilities (2023), and how different interfaces—physical, AR, and map-based—affect human-robot trust when specifying physical zones (2022). Her work bridges technical robotics with social science, offering practical insights for designing robots that are both capable and socially acceptable.