Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Munjal Desai is a prominent researcher specializing in human-robot interaction (HRI), trust in autonomous systems, and telepresence robotics. His work sits at the critical intersection of robotics, human factors, and cognitive science, addressing one of the field's most pressing challenges: how humans develop, calibrate, and maintain trust in robotic systems. Desai's most influential contributions center on understanding real-time trust dynamics. His landmark studies on how robot failures and changing reliability affect human trust — collectively garnering over 400 citations — revealed that traditional post-run trust measurements obscure crucial moment-to-moment shifts, fundamentally reshaping how researchers approach trust measurement in HRI. His parallel work on modeling trust has provided actionable frameworks for designing safer human-autonomy systems. Equally impactful is Desai's foundational research on telepresence robots. His explorations of use cases and essential features, conducted in partnership with Google, helped define the commercial and practical landscape for this emerging technology, accumulating nearly 350 citations combined. Beyond trust and telepresence, Desai has advanced sliding-scale autonomy blending and natural gesture interfaces for robot team control. His 2018 work on designing trustworthy robots synthesizes lessons across automation domains, offering enduring guidance for practitioners building reliable human-robot partnerships.