Papers
83
Total Citations
3,827
H-Index
35
About
Stefanie Tellex is a pioneering roboticist at Brown University whose work sits at the intersection of natural language processing, human-robot interaction, and autonomous manipulation. Her research tackles one of robotics' most fundamental challenges: enabling machines to understand and respond to the way humans naturally communicate. Her landmark 2011 paper on natural language commands for robotic navigation and mobile manipulation (674 citations) established probabilistic graphical models as a powerful framework for grounding language in physical robot behavior, building on her foundational work exploring symbol grounding from as early as 2010. Tellex has extended this vision across multiple dimensions — teaching robots to ask for help when they fail, interpret cooking recipes, and execute complex manipulation tasks through natural language planners. More recently, her lab has pioneered immersive interfaces for robot control, with influential work on virtual reality teleoperation and mixed-reality head-mounted displays that allow humans to intuitively direct robot arm motion. Her 2020 survey on robots that use language (204 citations) has become an essential reference for the field. Collectively, her contributions have shaped how researchers think about language-grounded autonomy, making her one of the most influential figures in modern human-robot interaction research.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Robots That Use Language204 citations · 2020
- 3Asking for Help Using Inverse Semantics167 citations · 2014
- 4Approaching the Symbol Grounding Problem with Probabilistic Graphical Models147 citations · 2011
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- 7Interpreting and Executing Recipes with a Cooking Robot115 citations · 2013
- 8A natural language planner interface for mobile manipulators114 citations · 2014
- 9Toward understanding natural language directions110 citations · 2010
- 10