Peggy van Minkelen

Peggy van Minkelen serves as a Research Associate within the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, focusing on human-robot interaction systems and their societal applications.

Her research centers on Social Robotics with specialized expertise in therapeutic applications for expressive aphasia patients and second language acquisition contexts. She integrates Self-Determination Theory to engineer motivational frameworks in educational robots, while pioneering work on affective bonding between humans and artificial agents examines emotional attachment mechanisms. Current investigations explore convention formation in human-robot communication through the SPOTTER framework.

Analysis of her 2020-2025 publications reveals consistent focus on clinical and educational robotics applications, with emerging emphasis on theoretical frameworks explaining human-social robot relationships. Key trends include cross-disciplinary integration of psychology, linguistics, and rehabilitation engineering to solve communication challenges.

Van Minkelen actively contributes to the €2.1M NWO-funded project Communicating with and Relating to Social Robots: Alice Meets Leolani (2020-2025) as core researcher, collaborating with computational linguists, psychologists, and roboticists. Her public engagement includes media appearances at Lowlands Festival and Festival van de Lage Landen demonstrating robot interaction systems.

She operates within VU Amsterdam's Social Robotics Lab ecosystem, participating in multidisciplinary teams developing the Leolani cognitive architecture for human-robot communication. Current work focuses on extending affective bonding theories to long-term human-robot relationships in healthcare contexts.