Papers
8
Total Citations
152
H-Index
6
About
Indu Bodala is a robotics and human-robot interaction researcher whose work spans two distinct but complementary domains: human trust in autonomous systems and the application of social robotics to mental health and wellbeing. Her early research made significant contributions to understanding how humans form, transfer, and generalize trust in robot capabilities across tasks, with her 2019 study on robot capability and intention in trust-based decisions accumulating 55 citations and offering foundational insights into human mental models of autonomous agents. Building on this foundation, Bodala pioneered the use of teleoperated social robots as coaches for mindfulness training, developing longitudinal frameworks that bring experienced human coaches into robotic delivery systems — work that has garnered over 43 citations and shaped emerging conversations around robot-assisted mental wellbeing. Her participatory design study further demonstrated her commitment to centering user perspectives in robotic system development. More recently, Bodala has expanded her research into efficient computer vision, exploring low-bit quantization, structured pruning, and transformer-based architectures for visual place recognition in resource-constrained robotic platforms. Across these areas, her research reflects a consistent drive to make robotics more trustworthy, accessible, and practically deployable in real-world human environments.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Robot Capability and Intention in Trust-Based Decisions Across Tasks55 citations · 2019
- 2Teleoperated Robot Coaching for Mindfulness Training: A Longitudinal Study43 citations · 2021
- 3Participatory Design of a Robotic Mental Well-being Coach20 citations · 2021
- 4Human Trust in Robot Capabilities across Tasks14 citations · 2018
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- 8Structured Pruning for Efficient Visual Place Recognition2 citations · 2024