Leonard Hinckeldey

PhD Student

Leonard works on making robots capable of collaborating with humans and other robots (ad-hoc teamwork)

Tell us about your journey before you joined the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy?

Before joining as a PhD student I did my undergraduate degree in Economics, where I first became interested in reinforcement learning as the concepts of reward resonated with the economic notions of utility. During my master’s in Applied Social Data Science, I explored this intersection further, using multi-agent reinforcement learning to study auction design. Today, my work centres on ad-hoc teamwork, designing generalist systems that can collaborate with any teammate, human or artificial, motivated by the vision of creating assistive robots that work seamlessly with each-other and humans on diverse real-world tasks.

What motivates you to work in this area?

I’m incredibly excited about the long-term prospects of embodied AI that can assist humans in day-to-day activities. We want AI to make a real impact in the physical world, taking on mundane or potentially dangerous tasks, something that current advances in LLMs cannot address by themselves. I’m also passionate about the positive potential of assistive robotics to improve the lives of people who are unable to live autonomously due to impairments. I believe these technologies can help them regain both autonomy and quality of life.

When you’re not working, how do you like to spend your spare time?

In my free-time I enjoy playing tennis, going on hikes, listening to music and taking photos.