A major barrier to realizing the long-promised productivity benefits of robotics is their limited usability for non-expert users. For service robots to be successfully integrated into everyday environments—such as sidewalks, homes, hospitals, and factories—humans must be able to interact with them quickly, safely, and effectively, often in unstructured and dynamic settings.

Despite impressive technical progress, most service robots still depend heavily on human oversight and support.  In these situations, communications between humans and robots remains an underexplored and failure-prone aspect of interaction. Enabling more natural, fluent, and multimodal communication between people and robots is critical to improving both their utility and societal acceptance.

While large language models and reinforcement learning have enhanced the capabilities of verbal interfaces and chatbots, nonverbal communication modalities—such as gestures, motion, and non-linguistic sound—remain significantly underdeveloped. In this talk, I will present recent research projects that aim to bridge this gap by enabling robots to detect, generate, and coordinate expressive communication cues, and by supporting users to provide better input. Together, these efforts work toward a more collaborative, responsive, and human-centric approach to human-robot interaction.

Professor Elizabeth Croft is the Vice-President Academic and Provost at the University of Victoria (UVic) in British Columbia, Canada, a research-intensive comprehensive university leading the world in climate action, sustainability, rights of indigenous peoples, health equity, and international research collaborations. She is internationally recognised for her leadership in research and education innovation and for advancing equity, diversity and inclusion in academia and industry.

Professor Croft holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of British Columbia, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a doctoral degree in robotics from the University of Toronto. She is an expert in the field of human-robot interaction. Her work advances the design of intelligent controllers and interaction methods that underpin how people and autonomous, collaborative systems can work together in a safe, predictable, and helpful manner. She has led large-scale collaborative research projects utilising robots alongside people in manufacturing and guided multidisciplinary initiatives with automotive and aerospace industry partners. Her outstanding contributions have earned Professor Croft considerable recognition, including the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Alan Blizzard Award, WXN’s Top 100 most powerful women in Canada award, and the Engineers and Geoscientists BC RA McLachlan Award.

Professor Croft is a fellow of the American Society of Engineers, the Institute of Engineers Australia, Engineers Canada, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering.