Scalable and Safe Humanoid Intelligence for Urban Environments
Fellow: Maria Pulido
Supervisor: Prof. Kinga R. Makovi
As a CITIES Post-Graduation Research Fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Yi Fang, Zhifei (Maggie) Li will develop scalable and safety-aware humanoid intelligence systems designed for complex urban environments. Building upon advances in embodied AI and robotics, the project investigates how humanoid robots can safely operate in dense, human-centered settings such as airports, hospitals, transportation hubs, and public service spaces. The research introduces a scalable training pipeline that learns human motion from large-scale monocular video data and integrates it into physics-grounded simulation environments with explicitly enforced safety constraints. By combining video-driven human motion learning, constrained reinforcement learning, and real-world humanoid deployment, the project aims to enable regulation-compliant and physically safe robot behavior in urban infrastructure. The work will culminate in deployment and validation on humanoid robots within representative city-like environments at NYU Abu Dhabi. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the project contributes to safer urban automation, sustainable city infrastructure, and the UAE’s growing ambition to pioneer responsible humanoid robotics in real-world public environments.