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About

Sonja Stork’s research sits at the intersection of cognitive science, motor control, and production engineering, exploring how humans and machines coordinate movement. Her most influential work, "Artificial Cognition in Production Systems" (127 citations), tackles the challenge of making manufacturing and assembly systems flexible enough to handle rapidly changing product varieties and market demands. By integrating artificial cognition into production, she proposes solutions for autonomous, reconfigurable systems that can adapt in real time. Stork’s experimental studies on human motor control reveal how task context and intention shape grasping actions—for instance, how picking up a bottle differs if you plan to pour versus place it. Her work on human-human and human-robot interaction (16 citations) examines how people naturally adapt their movements when working with a partner, offering insights for designing more intuitive collaborative robots. By bridging cognitive principles with industrial applications, Stork’s research has practical implications for smarter, more responsive production environments. Her findings on movement coordination and timing provide a foundation for creating robots that move and interact more naturally alongside humans.