Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Xavier Puig is an emerging researcher at the forefront of embodied AI, human-robot collaboration, and socially intelligent autonomous systems. His work centers on building robots and virtual agents capable of understanding, assisting, and collaborating with humans in complex, real-world home environments — a challenge that sits at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and cognitive science. Puig's most prominent contribution is his role in developing **Habitat 3.0** (2023), a sophisticated simulation platform that enables the study of collaborative tasks between humans, avatars, and robots. With 15 citations since its release, this work addresses critical challenges in modeling realistic humanoid motion, appearance diversity, and multi-agent interaction, providing the research community with a powerful tool for advancing embodied AI research. Complementing this, his **NOPA** framework tackles the nuanced problem of socially intelligent assistance — enabling robots to simultaneously infer human goals and act helpfully in real time, a capability essential for practical home assistants. His more recent work on **Situated Instruction Following** (2024) continues pushing boundaries in grounded language understanding for autonomous agents. Though early in his career, Puig's research is already shaping how the AI community approaches human-centered robotics, making him a researcher worth following closely.