Kristen Stubbs

About

Kristen Stubbs is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI) and field robotics, best known for her pioneering work on trust, autonomy, and communication in collaborative human-robot systems. Her most influential study, “Autonomy and Common Ground in Human-Robot Interaction: A Field Study” (161 citations), reports on a two-year field experiment in which a science team in Pittsburgh remotely operated a robot in Chile’s Atacama Desert—a Mars analog—demonstrating how increasing autonomy and shared understanding (common ground) improved team performance. This work, part of the “Life in the Atacama” (LITA) project, also contributed to robotic ecological mapping and a novel scoring system for habitability (31 and 17 citations, respectively). Stubbs has further advanced trustworthy robotics, outlining design lessons for fostering appropriate user trust (62 citations), and developed mobility enhancements for the Scout robot platform (46 citations) and heterogeneous robot teams for surveillance (43 citations). Her impact extends to education: she organized the STREAM workshop (24 citations) to introduce K–12 teachers to robotics, inspiring the next generation of engineers. With over 400 total citations, Stubbs’s work bridges technical robotics and human-centered design, shaping how robots are deployed in remote, high-stakes environments.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Autonomy and Common Ground in Human-Robot Interaction: A Field Study

   161 citations · 2007
2. 2
   Creating Trustworthy Robots: Lessons and Inspirations from Automated Systems

   62 citations · 2018
3. 3
   Mobility enhancements to the Scout robot platform

   46 citations · 2003
4. 4
   A robot team for surveillance tasks: Design and architecture

   43 citations · 2002
5. 5
   Robotic ecological mapping: Habitats and the search for life in the Atacama Desert

   31 citations · 2007
6. 6
   Using a robot proxy to create common ground in exploration tasks

   25 citations · 2008
7. 7
   Heterogeneous implementation of an adaptive robotic sensing team

   24 citations · 2004
8. 8
   STREAM: A workshop on the use of Robotics in K--12 STEM education [Education]

   24 citations · 2009
9. 9
   Life in the Atacama: A scoring system for habitability and the robotic exploration for life

   17 citations · 2007
10. 10
    Challenges to grounding in human-robot interaction

    14 citations · 2006

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links