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About

Roya Firoozi is a robotics researcher whose work spans the full spectrum from novel hardware platforms to cutting-edge AI integration. She is perhaps best known for her foundational contributions to two distinct areas: tensegrity robotics and foundation models for robotics. Her work on SUPERball, the Spherical Underactuated Planetary Exploration Robot ball at NASA Ames (183 citations), represents a major advance in creating resilient, untethered robots for space exploration, demonstrating how tensegrity structures can enable unprecedented durability and locomotion. More recently, Firoozi has been at the forefront of the paradigm shift toward foundation models in robotics; her comprehensive survey on the topic (2024, 163 citations) has become a key reference for researchers exploring how pretrained models can overcome the limitations of task-specific deep learning. She has also made significant contributions to game-theoretic motion planning, developing principled methods for intention communication and scalable multi-agent coordination. Her work on self-reflective robot navigation using language models (E2Map, 2025) and occlusion-aware safe navigation (OA-MPC) further showcases her ability to tackle fundamental challenges in autonomous systems. Firoozi’s research uniquely bridges hardware innovation and software intelligence, making her a leading voice in the future of embodied AI.