Designing Companion Robots
Meet Arty
Arty is a robotic dog designed to behave naturally and respond with empathy during interactions with people. Created to support children with autism and individuals who benefit from emotional assistance, Arty is designed to bring comforting companionship and engaging, at-home support through intuitive, human-friendly behavior.
Arty’s “trainers” include Professor Chung Hyuk Park, PhD students Keuntae Kim and Zannate Malik, and other lab members working in the Assistive Robotics and Tele-Medicine (ART-Med) lab at the George Washington University.
If you’d like to meet Arty and his owners and learn more about the research behind designing companion robots, stop by GW’s booth #329.
Designing Socially Assistive Companion Robots
In the Assistive Robotics and Tele-Medicine (ART-Med) lab at the George Washington University, Professor Chung Hyuk Park and his students explore how people and robots can work together in ways that improve everyday life, especially for neurodivergent individuals or persons with disabilities. Park’s team blends advanced technologies like machine learning, computer vision, haptics, and telepresence robotics to create tools that support, empower, and connect. Park’s research centers around three main areas:
Human-Robot Interaction for Assistive Support
The ART-Med lab team aims to design robotic systems that can better understand and respond to people using multiple forms of feedback. These innovations help the team build assistive technologies, for example socially interactive robots for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
- Kong, H. et al. 2024. Co-designing Robot Dogs with and for Neurodivergent Individuals: Opportunities and Challenges. In ASSETS ’24, Article 11.
- Kim, K. and Park, C. H. 2025. Data‑Driven Natural Behavior Model Design with Large Language Models for Robotic‑Animal Assisted Interventions (RAAI). In HRI ’25.
- GW Researchers Partner on Robot Design for Autistic Adults in Manufacturing
Robotic Learning and AI with Human-Inspired Intelligence
The ART-Med lab team is studying how robots can learn from human behavior. They are using machine-learning techniques to create robots that can observe, adapt, and develop more natural human-like ways of interacting with the world.
- Jair, P. H. and Park, C. H. 2026. Emotionally Adaptive Conversational Models for Long‑Term Human‑Robot Interaction Using Proximal Policy Optimization. In ICSR+AI 2025.
- Sharma, S., Kim, Y. and Park, C. H. Visuotactile Diffusion Policy: Automated Failure Recovery in Assistive Tasks with Tactile Manipulation Using Imitation Learning, 2025 22nd International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR), College Station, TX, USA, 2025, pp. 294-300.
- Zhao, Z., Chung, E., Chung, K. M., & Park, C. H. 2025. AV-FOS: A Transformer-Based Audio-Visual Multi-modal Interaction Style Recognition for Children with Autism Based on the Family Observation Schedule (FOS-II). IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics.
AI+Robotic Assistance in Healthcare and Medicine
The development of new approaches for using robots in medical and caregiving environments, from simple support tasks in daily care to intelligent systems that assist doctors during surgical procedures.
- Duygu, Y. C. et al. 2025. Real‑time teleoperation of magnetic force‑driven microrobots with a motion model and stable haptic force feedback for micromanipulation. Nanotechnol. Precis. Eng., 8(2), 023007.
- Malik, Z., Sidulova, M., & Park, C. H. 2026. Synergies Between Mind and Machine in Autism Research: An AI-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing Neural Dynamics. In Bridging the Gap between Mind and Machine: Exploring the Future of Human-AI-Neurotechnology Integration (pp. 175-196). (book chapter). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
- Xie, B. and Park, C. H. 2024. An Empathetic Social Robot with Modular Anxiety Interventions for Autistic Adolescents. In 2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN) (pp. 1148-1155). IEEE.
Robots of the ART-Med lab
To learn more about the research and work in the ART-Med lab at GW, visit Professor Park’s page.