Heni Ben Amor

Heni Ben Amor is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, where he leads research at the intersection of human-robot interaction, skill acquisition, and artificial intelligence. His work focuses on developing robots that learn from people the way humans learn from each other—through demonstration, physical interaction, multimodal feedback, and shared autonomy. Ben Amor’s research combines motor skill learning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, diffusion and generative policy models, and large language model reasoning to enable robots to acquire new competencies safely and efficiently. His group has contributed influential methods in real-time human–robot collaboration, bimanual manipulation learning, wearable motion-capture interfaces, predictive modeling for intuitive robot control, and uncertainty-aware motion planning. Many of his recent projects explore how LLMs can be leveraged for robot policy search, failure diagnosis, and intuitive human–robot communication. Ben Amor’s work spans both theoretical algorithm development and practical robotic systems, with applications ranging from flexible manipulation to assistive robotics and ubiquitous robot control. His lab collaborates widely across robotics, AI, cognitive science, and control, advancing the goal of embodied intelligent systems that seamlessly cooperate with humans in dynamic environments.