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About

Jack Thomas is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction, specializing in socially-compliant navigation and multimodal perception. His work focuses on enabling robots to negotiate shared spaces with humans, particularly in challenging scenarios like doorways and crowded environments. Thomas’s most influential paper, "After You: Doorway Negotiation for Human-Robot and Robot-Robot Interaction" (2018, 22 citations), introduces an autonomous behavior that allows robots to assertively but politely navigate doorways with both human and robot interlocutors, building on earlier work on aggressive robot-robot interactions. This research is extended in "Right of Way, Assertiveness and Social Recognition in Human-Robot Doorway Interaction" (2019, 9 citations), which further refines these behaviors to improve human recognition of robot right-of-way. In "Robust sensor fusion for finding HRI partners in a crowd" (2017, 13 citations), Thomas developed a probabilistic framework integrating multiple sensor modalities, enabling robots to reliably locate and approach interaction partners in uncontrolled settings. His early work, "What Untrained People Do When Asked 'Make The Robot Come To You'" (2016, 3 citations), provides foundational insights into natural human communication with robots, revealing diverse calls and gestures. Thomas’s contributions are critical for integrating robots into human environments, with his work cited over 47 times and shaping the design of socially-aware autonomous systems.