Professor Aylett is a member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and the Heriot-Watt Robotarium and has worked in robotics for more than thirty years. She focuses on AI-enabled architectures and human-robot interaction, including the generation and processing of social signals, and has around 300 scientific papers in the field. She has led teams in European projects researching how robots can be integrated into human environments long-term, and the creation of an empathic robot tutor.
She has just completed a project on how robots might help high-functioning adults with autism to practice their understanding of social signals and is about to start a project involving a story-telling robot to aid reminiscence in sufferers from dementia. She has authored two popular science books on robots, the most recent co-authored this year is ‘Living with robots – what every anxious human needs to know’.