Leila Takayama

Leila Takayama is a human-robot interaction researcher who uses social science to make robots easier for people to live and work with. Trained in cognitive science, psychology and communication at UC Berkeley and Stanford, she completed her Stanford PhD under Clifford Nass in 2008. At Willow Garage from 2009 to 2013, she managed human-robot interaction work on the PR2 robot, the Beam telepresence robots and ROS, and MIT Technology Review named her to its TR35 list in 2012. Her later posts included user-experience research for Project Wing at Google X, a tenured professorship at UC Santa Cruz, and Hoku Labs, the consultancy she started in 2016. Today she is VP of Design and HRI at Robust.AI, which she joined in June 2022 as the company unveiled its Carter robot concept for warehouses.

Now at: Robust.AI
Badges: Founder
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Timeline

By 2008

Berkeley and a Stanford PhD

She earns BAs in cognitive science and psychology at UC Berkeley, then an MA in communication at Stanford. In Clifford Nass's Communication between Humans and Interactive Media lab, she completes a Stanford PhD in communication in 2008 that wins the Nathan Maccoby Outstanding Dissertation Award. During graduate school, she is a research assistant in the User Interface Research group at PARC.
2009–2013

Robots at Willow Garage

After a post at Nokia Research, she manages human-robot interaction at Willow Garage from 2009 to 2013. Her team works on the design of the PR2 mobile manipulation research robot, the Beam telepresence robots and ROS, the open-source robot operating system.
2012

A TR35 innovator

MIT Technology Review names her to its 2012 TR35 list for applying social science to make robots easier to live and work with, and Fast Company counts her among the 100 most creative people in business in 2012. A crowdsourced study of the PR2's head, with its half-dozen cameras, leads her to argue successfully for removing all but a few of them. Her field studies of the Project Texai telepresence robot find that many pilots come to feel as if the robot is their body.
2013–2016

Project Wing at Google X

She works at Google X from 2013 to 2016 as a senior user experience designer and leads user-experience research for Project Wing and other robotics projects. The World Economic Forum names her a Young Global Leader in 2013, and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society gives her its Early Career Award in 2015.
2016–2018

Professor at UC Santa Cruz

She joins UC Santa Cruz in 2016, founds and leads the Re-embodied Cognition research lab on human-robot interaction, and earns tenure in 2018. She also starts Hoku Labs in 2016, a consulting business that turns human-robot interaction research into design recommendations for robotic products and services.
2019

Computational media and ocean robots

In 2019, she moves from the UC Santa Cruz psychology department to the Baskin School of Engineering's Computational Media department, and a Google Faculty Research Award funds her study of how robots can learn from their human peers. The Technical University of Munich's Institute for Advanced Study names her a Hans Fischer Fellow in 2019; hosted by Sami Haddadin, her Human-in-the-Loop Ocean Robotics group designs remote robot operation on land and at sea.
2022

Joining Robust.AI

She leaves her tenured UC Santa Cruz post in 2022 to pursue her Hoku Labs work. In June 2022, she joins Robust.AI as vice president of human-robot interaction and design, as the company unveils its Grace software suite and its Carter robot concept for warehouses.
As of October 2026

VP of design at Robust.AI

In May 2024, she gives the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute seminar "On Designing Robots to be Invisible-in-use," on making workplace robots more human-centered. At Fundación Innovación Bankinter's Future Trends Forum, she explains that Carter's design draws on familiar tools: workers steer it by its handlebars like a regular warehouse cart. She is Robust.AI's VP of Design and HRI.