John C. Murray

About

John C. Murray’s research sits at the intersection of robotics, animal cognition, and human-robot interaction, exploring how artificial agents can both study and mirror natural intelligence. His most influential work, “Using robots to understand animal cognition” (49 citations), established a framework for employing robotic surrogates to probe behavioral ecology—a method that has since been adopted by ethologists seeking controlled, repeatable stimuli. In swarm robotics, his development of an autonomous micro-robot platform (40 citations) addressed the hardware-cost barrier that often limits multi-robot research, providing an accessible testbed for bio-inspired collective behaviors. Murray also broke new ground in long-term human-robot companionship by deliberately engineering cognitive biases into robot behavior (12 citations), challenging the field to consider imperfection as a feature for sustained engagement. His cross-disciplinary approach extends to bioacoustics, where he combined cross-correlation and recurrent neural networks for robotic sound-source localization (44 citations), and to comparative psychology, where his work on bearded dragons’ perception of artificial conspecifics (12 citations) revealed critical design principles for realistic animal stimuli. Through these contributions, Murray has demonstrated that robots are not just tools but also models—for understanding the minds of animals, the dynamics of swarms, and the subtle art of companionship.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Using robots to understand animal cognition

   49 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Robotic sound-source localisation architecture using cross-correlation and recurrent neural networks

   44 citations · 2009
3. 3
   Development of an autonomous micro robot for swarm robotics

   40 citations · 2014
4. 4
   Towards an imperfect robot for long-term companionship: case studies using cognitive biases

   12 citations · 2015
5. 5
   Perception of artificial conspecifics by bearded dragons (<i>Pogona vitticeps</i>)

   12 citations · 2018
6. 6
   A neural network classifier for notch filter classification of sound-source elevation in a mobile robot

   7 citations · 2011
7. 7
   MIRA: A Learning Multimodal Interactive Robot Agent

   6 citations · 2008
8. 8
   Towards a model of emotion expression in an interactive robot head

   6 citations · 2009
9. 9
   The Influence of Social Interaction on the Perception of Emotional Expression: A Case Study with a Robot Head

   5 citations · 2009
10. 10
    A Hybrid Architecture Using Cross-Correlation and Recurrent Neural Networks for Acoustic Tracking in Robots

    5 citations · 2005

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links