Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (born 17 December 1977 in France) is a French roboticist and artificial intelligence researcher whose fields of work include robotics, cognitive robotics, and artificial intelligence. Educated at ENS Lyon and Pierre and Marie Curie University, he authored the 2003 thesis "L' auto-organisation de la parole" under the supervision of Luc Steels and Jean-Pierre Briot. He previously worked as a permanent researcher at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory from 1999 to 2007 and has also been affiliated with the University of Bordeaux. He currently serves as Research Director at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) and heads the Inria and ENSTA ParisTech FLOWERS team. In 2025, he appeared in the interview video 'Pierre-Yves Oudeyer et Didier Roy - C'est (pas) moi, c'est l'IA', and he maintains his official website at https://www.pyoudeyer.com/.

Oudeyer studied theoretical computer science at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, and received his Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from the University Paris VI, France. After working on computational models of language evolution, he is now working on developmental and social robotics, focusing on sensorimotor development, language acquisition and lifelong learning in robots. Strongly inspired by infant development, the mechanisms he studies include artificial curiosity, intrinsic motivation, the role of morphology in learning motor control, human-robot interfaces, joint attention and joint intentional understanding, and imitation learning.

He has published a book and more than 80 papers in international journals and conferences, and gave several invited keynote lectures in international conferences. Oudeyer holds 8 patents, and is inventor or co-inventor of over 15 patents covering 5 different technological issues.^[1] He received several prizes for his work in developmental robotics and on the origins of language, a number of awards for his thesis and certain publications, and is in particular a laureate of the ERC Starting Grant EXPLORERS.^[2]

Oudeyer is editor of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development, and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, and of the International Journal of Social Robotics. He is also working actively for the diffusion of science towards the general public, through the writing of popular science articles and participation to radio and TV programs as well as science exhibitions.