Portfolio / 2026Athens, Georgia
Robotics · Human–AI trust · Intelligent manufacturing
I’m JB Frericks, an engineering PhD candidate building physical, virtual, and AI-enabled systems that make human–machine trust observable.
“The most interesting part begins when a machine’s decision changes a person’s next move.”
I work across robotics, virtual reality, simulation, and intelligent manufacturing to understand how people monitor, question, and rely on AI-enabled teammates.
The work is deliberately hands-on: Unitree robots, Unity environments, ROS/Gazebo stacks, edge vision-language models, experiment interfaces, and synchronized multimodal data.
Read the full résuméEach project is a purpose-built environment for asking a specific question about intelligent machines and the people working alongside them.
A multi-building virtual world where participants plan, search, compare evidence, and make consequential choices with robot partners.
Inside the experiment / 01
A ROS/Gazebo environment built to study trust across a sequence of robot navigation, puzzle, maze, and wire tasks.
Controlled environment / 02
A Unitree Go2 sensing stack that turns spatial and motion data into repeatable measures of factory-floor organization.
Innovation Factory / 03
An explainable framework that translates ambiguous worker requests into grounded actions for a mixed team of robots.
One connected practice
Design the robot, virtual world, task, and interface around the behavior the research needs to reveal.
Bring behavior, speech, gaze, physiological signals, system telemetry, and self-report into one timeline.
Turn experimental findings into design principles for safer and more legible autonomous systems.
Awards, papers, and work currently moving toward publication.
Manufacturing Empathy: Sensorial AI for Rewriting Human–AI Collaboration
First author
Second author
Heart rate · GSR/EDA · EEG · eye tracking
Open to the next hard problem
I’d be glad to talk about applied AI, robotics, intelligent manufacturing, or the human side of autonomy.
