Parag Khanna

PhD in Advanced Human-Robot Interaction at Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH.

I am a robot enthusiast who wants to bring the robotic development in labs to daily lives of people. My motivation has been those school days when many theoretical concepts of physics and mathematics urged me to ponder about their implementation and feasibility in real-world scenarios.

Currently I am involved in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and in particular,Robot Human handovers. Robots already occupy a large part in our industries. However, with current advancements in technology, they are expected to be a part of our daily surroundings soon enough, collaborating with us and serving us. Sadly though unlike in movies robots find it hard to perform simple yet essential tasks. Tasks that we perform seamlessly yet don’t realize. One such task is handover: the simple task of passing a thing to another person. My research focuses on getting seamless handovers between robots and humans.

Several collaborating robots largely rely on the person to adapt for handover. They will drop an object in your hand or release it after you pull at it hard enough. This makes handover unnatural and the entire responsibility of handover falls on the person. Now, we don’t really want to play tug of war with a barista robot for our coffee. In a more serious scenario, consider service robotsin an old age home or around children.

My approach is to study human-human handovers and the involved forces. As a part of initial study, I collected a data-set of over 2000 handovers and am using data driven Machine Learning methods to inspire new techniques for robot-human handovers. We humans have perfected our handovers by doing them unlimited times over several years, so we indeed are the best examples to learn from.

My research is also a part of Digital Futures - Advanced Adaptive Intelligent Systems project at KTH. This project has as one of its primary goals to developm ethods and technology to help elderly and other disabled persons to have more autonomy and live more active lives without requiring help from others.

Linkedin: parag-khanna