HRIpreneur Thinking: Strategies Towards Faster Innovation and Commercialization of Academic HRI Research

In recent years, there has been a rapid rise in new product innovations in robots, robotic devices, human-robot interfaces, and social robots across the globe. This has largely been due to several inter-disciplinary research & development output from industries as well as a few robotics research institutions who have successfully embraced the convergence of braintech, robotics engineering, biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and novel platform in human-machine interactions. However, the rate and scale of innovation in human-robot interaction (HRI) and their impact in creating social goods is still much slower compared to similar developments in other fields of research. We surmise that HRI innovation and commercialization of HRI products present unique challenges that are typically not encountered in other industries. Fragmented research, lack of supporting infrastructure and the gaps between lab research and user needs; as well as lack of venture capital investment in hardware products have led to sluggish innovation and longer duration of bringing those innovation into the real-world market. In this paper, we discuss the unique set of challenges faced by current HRI research/innovation and propose some methodology to direct the academic intellectual resources towards faster commercialization of their research.