Pierce Howell

I am a Robotics Ph.D. student. My research interests span the domains of robot learning, multi-robot systems, and human-robot interaction. My vision is to enable robots that are self-sufficient, yet can perform diverse tasks, learn new behaviors, and collaborate as a team, all with minimal expert guidance. In line with this vision, my dissertation focuses on developing learning algorithms that can learn efficiently and generalize well for complex multi-robot teaming domains. Alongside my passion for robotics, I love rock climbing, reading books, and spending lots of time with friends!

Papers

• Capability-Aware Shared Hypernetworks for Flexible Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Coordination — Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025
• Learning Flexible Heterogeneous Coordination With Capability-Aware Shared Hypernetworks — Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) - Extended Abstract, 2025
• Generalization of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Policies via Awareness and Communication of Capabilities — Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023
• The Effects of Robot Motion on Comfort Dynamics of Novice Users in Close-Proximity Human-Robot Interaction — International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
• Fast Anticipatory Motion Planning for Close-Proximity Human-Robot Interaction — Workshop on Close Proximity Human-Robot Collaboration, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2022