Abstract:

When I started in robotics, my goal was to help robots emulate humans. Yet as my lab worked with people with mobility impairments, my notions of success changed. For assistive applications, emulation of humans is less important than ease of use and usefulness. Helping with seemingly simple tasks, such as scratching an itch or picking up a dropped object, can make a meaningful difference in a person’s life. Even full autonomy can be undesirable, since actively directing a robot can provide a sense of independence and agency. Overall, many benefits of robotic assistance derive from nonhuman aspects of robots, such as being tireless, directly controllable, and free of social characteristics that can inhibit use.

While technical challenges abound for home robots that attempt to emulate humans, I will provide evidence that human-scale mobile manipulators could benefit people with mobility impairments at home in the near future. I will describe work from my lab and Hello Robot that illustrates opportunities for valued assistance at home, including supporting activities of daily living, leading exercise games, and strengthening social connections. I will also present recent progress by Hello Robot toward unsupervised, daily in-home use by a person with severe mobility impairments.

Bio:

Dr. Charlie Kemp is a cofounder and the chief technology officer (CTO) of Hello Robot. Hello Robot sells Stretch, a novel mobile manipulator designed to work closely with people that is being used by hundreds of developers across 22 countries for diverse projects, including pioneering work on embodied AI, human-robot interaction, and assistive applications. Until 2023, Dr. Kemp was a tenured faculty member at Georgia Tech, where he founded the Healthcare Robotics Lab in 2007.

Dr. Kemp’s research has focused on enabling intelligent mobile manipulators to assist older adults and people with disabilities. He is passionate about open communities to advance robotics and has won awards for teaching biomechanics and a project-based robotics class. He earned a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an MEng, and BS from MIT. He is a co-author of over 120 peer-reviewed publications. His awards include a 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Hesburgh Award Teaching Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award. Hello Robot’s awards include the 2025 RBR50 Robots for Good Award, the 2024 IEEE Spectrum Technology in the Service of Society Award, the 2021 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award, and the 2020 Silicon Valley Robotics Innovation Award.