Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Maxwell Forbes is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction, with a primary focus on making robot programming accessible to non-experts. His work centers on Programming by Demonstration (PbD), where users teach robots new behaviors through natural demonstrations rather than traditional coding. Forbes’s key contribution lies in integrating situated spatial language understanding with PbD, allowing users to augment physical demonstrations with intuitive speech commands—a natural, hands-free way to guide robot learning. His most cited paper (65 citations) pioneered this approach, enabling robots to interpret spatial language in context. To overcome the bottleneck of requiring numerous expensive human demonstrations, Forbes innovatively introduced crowdsourcing into imitation learning, showing how distributed online workers can provide action fixes and supplementary demonstrations (26 and 25 citations respectively). This work dramatically accelerates robot learning while reducing the burden on individual users. His research on balancing shared autonomy with human-robot communication (3 citations) further explores efficient human-robot collaboration. Forbes’s contributions are foundational to democratizing robot programming, making it possible for everyday users to teach robots complex tasks without specialized technical knowledge—a critical step toward widespread robot adoption in homes and workplaces.