Spring Robotics Colloquium: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee (Cornell)

Why It Matters

Robotic caregivers that adapt to individual needs could alleviate caregiver shortages while preserving patient dignity, accelerating the shift toward autonomous, person‑centered home health care.

Key Takeaways

• Physical robot caregiving must adapt to diverse users, tasks, environments.
• Feeding robots require multimodal perception and skill planning for varied foods.
• Human-in-the-loop remains essential due to inevitable robot failures.
• Open-source toolboxes accelerate research and stakeholder collaboration across labs.
• Empathy-driven design ensures robots serve individual dignity and autonomy.

Summary

The Spring Robotics Colloquium featured Tapo Bhattacharjee of Cornell, who outlined his lab’s work on physical robot caregiving—particularly robot‑assisted feeding—and why such technology must be built around real users, not abstract algorithms.

He emphasized that caregiving is highly contextual: tasks, user abilities, environments, and caregiver styles all vary dramatically. With a chronic shortage of human aides, robots could fill gaps, but they must balance generalization with deep personalization. Bhattacharjee traced the field’s history from 1960s tongue‑controlled manipulators to today’s multimodal, AI‑driven feeding arms, noting that most commercial attempts have failed due to lack of adaptability.

A striking example was a quadriplegic’s daily struggle, illustrating how a reliable robot could prevent costly emergencies and restore autonomy. Technically, his team combines visual language models, task planners, and haptic affordance learning to execute bite acquisition and transfer, yet acknowledges frequent failures that require a human‑in‑the‑loop safety net.

The talk underscores that successful deployment hinges on open‑source toolboxes, continuous stakeholder feedback, and empathy‑centric design. If these principles are adopted, robot caregivers could become viable, dignified extensions of the care ecosystem, reshaping home health and reducing systemic strain.

Original Description

Title: Physical Intelligence for Physical Care: Towards Stakeholder-Informed Caregiving Robots in the Real World

Speaker: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee (Cornell)

Date: Friday, April 24, 2026

Abstract: How can we build robots that meaningfully assist people with mobility limitations in their daily lives? To support complex caregiving tasks such as robot-assisted feeding, bathing, transferring, and meal preparation, robots must physically interact with people and objects in dynamic, unstructured environments while maintaining safety. In this talk, I will present an overview of projects from the EmPRISE Lab that showcase fundamental advances in physical robot caregiving. I will highlight how we design stakeholder-informed systems with personalized contact-rich control policies and user functionality- and behavior-aware physical robot assistance. I will also share insights from deploying these systems with real users in real-world settings. Together, these efforts move us closer to building caregiving robots that are not only technically capable, but are also safe, deployable, and responsive to the real needs of people in care settings.

Bio: Tapomayukh "Tapo" Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he directs the EmPRISE Lab (https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/). He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in the area of physical robot caregiving and physical human-robot interaction. He is the recipient of TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award'24, NSF CAREER Award'23, AFCEA 40 under 40 Award'22, and his work has won Best Paper Award at RSS’25, Best Paper and Student Paper Award Finalist and Best HRI Paper Award Finalist at ICRA’25, Best Systems Paper Award Finalist at HRI'24, Best Demo Award at HRI'24, Best RoboCup Paper Award at IROS’22, Best Paper Award Finalist and ABB Best Student Paper Award Finalist at IROS’22, Best Technical Advances Paper Award at HRI'19, and Best Demonstration Award at NeurIPS’18. His work has also been featured in many media outlets including the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, and GeekWire and his robot-assisted feeding work was selected to be one of the best interactive designs of 2019 by Fast Company.

This video is in the process of being closed captioned.