Designing Social Robots for Scalable Longitudinal Interventions w/ Victor Antony

​Social robots hold immense promise as tools for enhancing human wellbeing, but most systems remain confined to short-term, lab-based studies. This talk presents a research program aimed at designing social robots to be scalable, real-world intervention platforms. The future of social robotics, Victor argues, will not be engineered alone; instead, it will be co-designed, co-created, and continuously shaped through lived, everyday experiences. Victor will introduce a design-first approach that combines participatory design with stakeholders, generative AI for context-appropriate robot behavior, open and low-cost robotic platforms, and longitudinal in-the-wild deployments. Rather than asking what robots can do, this line of work asks: what kinds of relationships should we design between humans and machines to sustainably deliver interventions?