I work as a Researcher in Trustworthy Human-Robot Interaction since July 2022, funded by the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Programme, Node on Trust.
My work involves designing augmented reality (AR) user interfaces (UIs) for controlling assistive robots, including smart wheelchairs, mobile and legged manipulators, bi-manual robots, etc.
I design these interfaces to make controlling such robots easier for users lacking experience or having disabilities.
My background involves different areas of Electrical Engineering.
My bachelor’s emphasis was electronics, my licentiate degree (First Class Honours) was in telecommunications, and my master’s (First Class Honours) was in digital signal processing.
I studied these at the Universidad de Costa Rica, where I also worked as a part-time lecturer on analogue electronics.
I also worked in the telecommunications industry for almost ten years.
I was responsible for maintaining and operating a large Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) network.
I came to Imperial College for my PhD. My thesis topic was “Affordance Inference and Visualisation for Assistive Robotics”.
I received my PhD degree in June 2022.
In my research, I combine robot affordances, i.e., relations between the objects in the environment and the actions that robots can apply to them, with AR head-mounted display UIs as a novel design paradigm for controlling assistive robotic platforms.
Rather than expecting users to know what capabilities the assistive robots have and what input commands are required to leverage these capabilities, I use the assistive platform’s sensor data to infer robot affordances in the environment and inform the users about these through virtual icons overlaid onto the environment using AR.
My current research interests involve Augmented Reality User Interfaces, Assistive Robotics, Affordance perception, Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Centred Robotics and Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence.