USC robotics research
- A USC professor’s work on socially assistive robotics for therapy resurfaced in recent academic mentions. - The coverage highlighted therapeutic robotics applications and USC’s Physical Superintelligence Lab activity in assistive systems. - The note appeared in a recent social post pointing to IEEE Spectrum coverage of USC’s socially assistive robotics research (x.com)
Socially assistive robotics is the branch of robotics that tries to help people with coaching, conversation, and motivation instead of lifting or carrying them. At the University of Southern California, that work is closely associated with professor Maja Matarić, whose research resurfaced this week in a new IEEE Spectrum profile. (spectrum.ieee.org) IEEE Spectrum reported on April 20, 2026 that Matarić helped define socially assistive robotics in 2005 and built robots that can talk, play games, and respond to emotions in therapy settings. The article says her newer work includes robots aimed at supporting students with anxiety and depression through cognitive behavioral therapy. (spectrum.ieee.org) The basic idea is to use a machine as a coach rather than a mechanical helper. In a widely cited IEEE article, Matarić and collaborators described the field as automating supervision, coaching, motivation, and companionship for groups including stroke survivors, older adults with dementia, and children with autism spectrum disorder. (ieeexplore.ieee.org) USC’s own profile of Matarić says she holds appointments in computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics and specializes in robots for health, aging, education, training, therapy, and rehabilitation. The university says her projects have included robot-assisted therapies for autism, stroke and traumatic brain injury recovery, and Alzheimer’s care. (today.usc.edu) That work sits inside a larger USC robotics operation. USC’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center says it was established in 2002 and lists socially assistive robotics among its major research areas, alongside humanoid, aerial, marine, and rehabilitation robotics. (rasc.usc.edu) The center says its robotics program now spans 13 laboratories and more than 70 physical robots. USC says those systems range from mobile robot teams to humanoids and are used across human-robot interaction, rehabilitation, education, and other applications. (rasc.usc.edu) The recent attention also landed alongside activity from a newer USC lab working on a different slice of assistive and embodied systems. The Physical Superintelligence Lab says it develops robotic systems for humanoids and other mobile platforms using multimodal data, learning pipelines, and deployment tools, and its contact page identifies it as part of USC’s computer science department. (psi-lab.ai 1) (psi-lab.ai 2) That makes the USC story less about a single new paper than about continuity across generations of robotics research. One line focuses on robots as social partners in therapy, and another focuses on the underlying perception, learning, and control systems needed to make robots work reliably in the physical world. (spectrum.ieee.org) (rasc.usc.edu) (psi-lab.ai) Matarić’s profile in IEEE Spectrum framed the field through patients and students rather than hardware specs. The throughline in USC’s robotics work is the same one her research helped establish two decades ago: robots designed to assist people by shaping behavior, attention, and daily routines through interaction. (spectrum.ieee.org) (ieeexplore.ieee.org)
