October 30, 2026
By Tracie Troha

The National Science Foundation’s Mind, Machine and Motor Nexus (M3X) program has awarded a $700,000 grant to a multidisciplinary team led by Ye Zhao, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, to advance collaboration between humans and humanoid robots. The project, “Cooperative Transport and Social Navigation of Physical Human-Humanoid Teaming with Bidirectional Communications,” will explore how people and robots can communicate, adapt to one another, transport objects safely, and navigate environments such as crowded spaces, uneven terrain, and stairs.

Zhao leads a team that includes co-principal investigators Mohsen Moghaddam, Gary C. Butler Family Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Woodruff School; Chris Wiese, associate professor in the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences; and Anqi Wu, James Edenfield Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Together, the researchers bring expertise in extended reality, multimodal sensing, artificial intelligence, and human teamwork and trust.

By combining wearable and robot-based sensing, human-state estimation, and reinforcement learning, the team aims to create systems that better understand human intent and respond naturally during collaborative tasks. The ultimate goal is to make humanoid robots more effective in settings such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, construction, agriculture, and emergency response.

“In the long term, this work could help shift humanoid robotics from specialized demonstrations toward dependable tools that augment people in everyday work and public life,” Zhao said.