Hosted by Owen Herman, Denver LMAG Chair, Life members and guests from the Denver and Pikes Peak Life Member Affinity Groups and High Plains Sections visited the Human Interaction & Robotics Group (HIRO) labs in May 2023.

The HIRO labs are within the Department of Computer Science of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. The group met with Dr. Alessandro Roncone and a number of his Ph.D. students, four of whom presented recent research on programming and training robots to interact with humans.

The HIRO labs website describes their work as being at the intersection of research in human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, and robot control & planning. The lab aims to develop robot technologies that enable close, natural, and extended cooperation with humans.