Dr Rodrigo Chacon Quesada

Dr Rodrigo Chacón Quesada has worked as a Researcher in Trustworthy Human-Robot Interaction since July 2022, funded by the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Programme, Node on Trust. His work involves designing augmented reality (AR) user interfaces (UIs) for controlling assistive robots, including smart wheelchairs, mobile and legged manipulators, bi-manual robots, etc. He designs these interfaces to make controlling such robots easier for users lacking experience or having disabilities.

His background involves different areas of Electrical Engineering. His bachelor's emphasis was electronics, his licentiate degree (First Class Honours) was in telecommunications, and his master's (First Class Honours) was in digital signal processing. He studied these at the Universidad de Costa Rica, where he also worked as a part-time lecturer on analogue electronics. He also worked in the telecommunications industry for almost ten years. He was responsible for maintaining and operating a large Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) network.

He came to Imperial College for his PhD. His thesis topic was "Affordance Inference and Visualisation for Assistive Robotics". He received his PhD degree in June 2022. In his research, he combines robot affordances, i.e., relations between the objects in the environment and the actions that robots can apply to them, with AR head-mounted display UIs as a novel design paradigm for controlling assistive robotic platforms. Rather than expecting users to know what capabilities the assistive robots have and what input commands are required to leverage these capabilities, he uses the assistive platform’s sensor data to infer robot affordances in the environment and inform the users about these through virtual icons overlaid onto the environment using AR.

His current research interests involve Augmented Reality User Interfaces, Assistive Robotics, Affordance perception, Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Centred Robotics and Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence.

Publications