Speaker: Cristina Wilson

Abstract: Robots are increasingly deployed to support field work in domains like agriculture and science exploration, yet are still largely treated as passive participants rather active partners with human workers. This gap is not due to a lack of robotic capability, but to a limited understanding of how these systems should contribute to human decision making. This talk presents a reimagination of the role of robots in field work across land, sea, and space. I will show how insights from human cognition can inform the design of robotic systems that reason and interact with human teammates in ways that align with real-world domain workflows. I will present results from field deployments demonstrating how these cognitively-informed systems can support more efficient and optimal work outcomes.

Bio: Cristina Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems institute at Oregon State University. Her research is conceiving and designing new human-robot teaming workflows for field operations on land, underwater, and in space. Dr. Wilson’s research is informed by her background in cognitive science — she received her MS and PhD in cognitive psychology from Washington State University, and her BS in psychology from Pacific University in 2012. From 2018 to 2022 she held a joint position as a postdoctoral research fellow in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program at Temple University.

Dr. Wilson's research involves field expeditions with prototype robotic platforms — including mixed teams of undergraduates, graduate students, and experts from diverse disciplines —testing different algorithms and human interfaces that integrate support for adaptive decision making. Her work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, ONR, and USDA, and featured in press by the BBC, NPR, Reuters, OPB, IEEE Spectrum, Aerospace America, and other outlets.