Bot Intelligence Group

BIG is a research group in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Our goal is to create robots that can co-exist and collaborate with humans in shared environments, continuously learning to improve themselves over time through training, exploration, and interaction. Our philosophical research goal is to develop technologies to remind us of “what makes us humans,” promoting humanity such as safety, creativity, and compassion. Toward this goal, we develop learning and planning algorithms, data utilization methods, simulation technologies, and agentic models.

On safety, our navigation research addresses the safety of indoor space, urban driving, and aerial transportation. In social robot navigation, we investigate how agents make robust decisions under the high uncertainty of other agents’ behaviors.

On creativity, FRIDA is our Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts where we connect robotics with various forms of arts such as painting, sculpting, pottery, pasta making, and more. Whereas generative AI only exists in the virtual space, our work creates physical artifacts in the real world made by robot hands. FRIDA aims to achieve the robotic dexterity of skilled artisans to assist human users.

On compassion, we investigate the data equity issue in various domains. For example, we are interested in tackling cultural biases prevalent in large AI models due to the imbalance of data distribution. We aim to develop safe, responsible, and compassionate AI and robotics systems.

Research