About Me

Snehesh Shrestha I am currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. I work in the Perception and Robotics Group (PRG) lab in the Department of Computer Science under the guidance of Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos, Dr. Cornelia Fermuller, and Dr. Ge Gao and in the Culture Lab in the Department of Psychology under the guidance of Dr. Michelle Gelfand. My research is the area of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence focusing on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). I work in the Drone lab and the Humanoid lab to build robots that are intuitive, efficient, and explainable.

Today, the interaction between robots and humans is like a chess game – each player waiting for their turns. Robots of the future will need to be better. They need to be fluid in interaction, predict beyond passive observations, take initiatives rather than simply follow commands, be interpretable rather than a magical black box, understand the group culture and personal preferences, and most importantly be likable. My primary research interest is in answering the questions of how can we build a system for robots so that robots and humans can interact with each other naturally as humans do amongst ourselves.