Vimitha Manohar

Higher Institute of Engineering, Aarupadai Veedu Medical College & Hospital

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Vimitha Manohar is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction, with a focus on making robots more accessible and emotionally expressive. Her work centers on two key areas: enabling non-expert users to program robots and enhancing robots’ ability to convey emotions through behavior. In her most-cited paper (2014, 22 citations), she explored how end-users can program robots to express emotions across different interaction paradigms and communication modalities, arguing that robots’ utility will remain limited without user-friendly programming tools. She further investigated this in a 2011 study (3 citations) analyzing how interfaces for Nao and Pleo robots allow users to encode emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, and surprise. Manohar also contributed to cognitive telepresence (2013, 5 citations), examining remote operation of semi-autonomous robots for critical applications in the Middle East, such as underwater oil well maintenance and nuclear plant safety. More recently, she advanced interactive robotics with a 2021 paper on speech and gesture recognition. Her work bridges technical robotics and human-centered design, laying groundwork for robots that are both intuitive to program and capable of nuanced emotional communication—a vital step toward integrating robots into healthcare, assistive industries, and everyday life.