Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Tayfun Alpay investigates the critical nexus of human-robot interaction (HRI) and trust, exploring how robots can become effective collaborators. His most impactful work, "An Immersive Investment Game to Study Human-Robot Trust" (22 citations), pioneers a novel, game-based methodology to measure the nuanced factors that build or erode trust between humans and autonomous systems. Alpay’s research extends to robot personality design, as shown in "Designing a Personality-Driven Robot for a Human-Robot Interaction Scenario" (15 citations), where he demonstrated that a robot’s social engagement significantly boosts user acceptance over a purely competitive demeanor. He further broadens HRI applications by investigating robots as educators, using a fictional language and a *Game of Thrones*-inspired role-playing game to compare virtual and physical teaching agents. On the technical side, Alpay’s work on "Adaptive and Variational Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks" (5 citations) contributes to developmental robotics by modeling cognitive processes across continuous timescales. Through immersive scenarios and personality-driven design, Alpay is shaping how we build trustworthy, socially intelligent robots for the future.