I know that you know that I know: Enabling Embodied Cognition Capabilities in Collaborative Robotic Systems

In this talk I will introduce our recent developments and results on Embodied and Epistemic reasoning and planning for collaborative autonomy applications. I will show how thery-of-mind reasoning combined with cognitive science and control and motion planning methods enable robots to become more autonomous and collaborative even in the absence of direct communications between the agents. Several demonstrations on heterogeneous robotic systems and human-robot applications will be presented during the talk. This work is supported by a recent DARPA YFA award.

Nicola Bezzo

Associate Professor, University of Virginia on March 13, 2026 at 10:15 AM in EB2 1231
Join Zoom Webinar

"Nicola Bezzo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering(ECE ) with courtesy appointments in Systems and Information Engineering (SIE) and Computer Science (CS) at the University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to UVA he was a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in the Precise Center working on research related to assured and resilient autonomy. He obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of New Mexico working on multi-robot systems motion planning and control under communication uncertainties.
At UVA he leads the Autonomous Mobile Robots Lab (AMR Lab) and he is also part and a founding member of the CPS-focused LINK Lab. His research interests span: multi-robot and heterogeneous robotic systems coordination, safe and agile motion planning and control of mobile robots under uncertainties, embodied and cognitive reasoning in robotics, and resilient and assured autonomy.
He is the recipient of the 2025 DARPA Young Faculty Award, the 2022 Amazon Faculty Research Award, and the Gold Medal from the Polytechnic University of Milan. His work has received multiple Best Paper Awards and recognitions at top venues including RAM, ICCPS, SIEDS. His research is supported by DARPA, NSF, ONR, and AFRL. His industry collaborators and sponsors include Northrop Grumman, Amazon, Boeing, CoStar, MITRE, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Leidos. He is an IEEE Senior Member, an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and he has served on the editorial board and as an organizers for several conferences like ICRA, IROS, ACC, ICCPS."

This lecture series features exciting and dynamic visiting and virtual speakers from across the range of ECE disciplines. Take some time every Friday morning to be inspired by these great scientists and engineers before heading into the weekend!