heather knight
Dr. Heather Knight is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at Oregon State University. There, her CHARISMA research group uses methods from Entertainment to bootstrap the development of Social Robots. Their research interests include minimal social robots, robot ethics, charismatic machines, and multi-robot/multi-human social interaction.
She also runs Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company with comedy performances and an annual Robot Film Festival. Past honors include robot comedy on TED.com, a robot flower garden installation at the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, and a British Video Music Award for OK GO’s “This Too Shall Pass” music video, featuring a two-floor Rube Goldberg Machine. She was named to AdWeek’s top 100 creatives in 2017, and Forbes List’s 30 under 30 in Science in 2011.
Her academic background includes a postdoc at Stanford University exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces, a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University exploring Expressive Motion for Low Degree of Freedom Robots, and M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed a sensate skin for a robot teddy bear at the MIT Media Lab. Additional past work includes: robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics.