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About

Ashley Foots is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, natural language processing, and dialogue systems, with a particular focus on how humans communicate with robots in collaborative and real-world task environments. Working primarily within the Army Research Laboratory ecosystem, Foots has made meaningful contributions to the development of data-driven approaches for building natural language interfaces that enable intuitive human-robot teaming. Foots' most influential work, "Exploring Variation of Natural Human Commands to a Robot in a Collaborative Navigation Task" (2017, 22 citations), investigates how people naturally phrase instructions to robots during navigation tasks — foundational insight for designing more responsive and human-centered robotic systems. This research laid groundwork for subsequent corpus development efforts, including the SCOUT corpus, a richly annotated, multi-modal dialogue dataset constructed from Wizard-of-Oz experiments that continues to serve the research community. Across multiple publications, Foots has contributed to refining Wizard-of-Oz methodologies for dialogue data collection, developing annotation guidelines, and studying user perceptions of autonomous vehicles in military settings. This body of work reflects a consistent commitment to bridging the gap between human communication and robotic capability — research with clear implications for defense, industry, and everyday human-robot collaboration.