Welcome to the 2022 National Robotics Initiative and Foundational Research in Robotics Principal Investigators' Meeting. This year's meeting will be held virtually over three days from Tuesday, April 19 through Thursday, April 21, 2022.

The goal of the PI meeting is to assemble the community of researchers, industry representatives, non-governmental and non-profit organizations, and Government program managers who are actively engaged in the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) and the Foundational Research in Robotics (FRR) Program to review the progress, challenges, and future directions of NRI and FRR research and to provide an environment for PIs to showcase their research and to network.

The NRI program was launched during 2011 to achieve the following objectives:

• foster awareness and communication between NRI teams, many of whom employ complementary or competing approaches to related problems
• offer a forum for demonstrating and sharing best practices in education, technology transfer, and general outreach
• provide concentrated opportunities to share NRI successes with the media and other government agencies
• establish a centralized and lasting repository representing and illustrating the research ideas explored by and milestones achieved by NRI projects over the past year

The FRR program supports research on robotic systems that exhibit significant levels of both computational capability and physical complexity where intelligence is embodied in engineered constructs, with the ability to process information, sense, and move within or substantially alter their working environments.

Dr. Holly Yanco is a Distinguished University Professor, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, evaluation metrics and methods for robot systems, and the use of robots in K-12 education to broaden participation in computer science. Yanco's research has been funded by NSF, including a CAREER Award, the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, ARO, DARPA, DOE-EM, ONR, NASA, NIST, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon. Yanco has a PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College. She is a AAAI Fellow.

Matthew Johnson-Roberson is director of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and a Professor in the School of Computer Science. He received a PhD from the University of Sydney in 2010. He has held prior postdoctoral appointments with the Centre for Autonomous Systems - CAS at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney. He co-founded Refraction AI a last-mile autonomous vehicle delivery company. He has worked in robotic perception since the first DARPA grand challenge and his group focuses on enabling robots to bette