Siddhartha Srinivasa
Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa founded the Personal Robotics Lab with the goal of enabling robots to perform complex manipulation tasks under uncertainty and clutter, with and around people. Sidd is also passionate about building end-to-end systems (HERB, ADA, HRP3, CHIMP, Andy, among others) that integrate perception, planning, and control in the real world. Understanding the interplay between system components has helped produce state of the art algorithms for object recognition and pose estimation (MOPED), and dense 3D modeling (CHISEL, now used by Google Project Tango).
Oren Salzman
Oren Salzman completed his PhD in the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Dan Halperin. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University working with Siddhartha Srinivasa and Maxim Likhachev. His research focus is robot motion planning. Specifically, his research focuses on revisiting classical computer science algorithms, tools and paradigms to address the computational challenges that arise when planning motions for real-world robots. Combining techniques from diverse domains such as computational geometry, surface simplification, random geometric graphs, graph theory and machine learning, he strives to provide efficient algorithms with rigorous analysis for robot systems with many degrees of freedom moving in tight quarters. He earned his BSc with honors from the Technion and his MSc with honors from Tel Aviv University.
Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Tapomayukh "Tapo" Bhattacharjee completed his PhD in Robotics from Georgia Tech under the supervision of Prof. Charlie Kemp. His primary research interests are in the fields of haptic perception, machine learning, manipulation and human-robot interaction. He believes in the potential of using multimodal haptic signals to enhance robot manipulation capabilities in unstructured environments as well as around humans. He aims to achieve this by inferring relevant properties of the world using physics-based and data-driven methods.
Sanjiban Choudhury
Sanjiban Choudhury completed his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, under the supervision of Prof. Sebastian Scherer. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Washington working with Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research focus is on problems at the intersection of machine learning and motion planning. During his PhD, he developed the motion planning architecture, that integrated learning and planning, for an autonomous full-scale helicopter. Sanjiban has a MS from CMU, a BTech and MTech from IIT Kharagpur. He has also worked at Microsoft Research as in intern on imitation learning for sequential decision-making. He is a Siebel Scholar, class of 2013.
Matt Barnes
Matt Barnes is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington with Prof. Sidd Srinivasa. He holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed statistical estimators and scalable clustering algorithms for the CMU counter-human trafficking project. His research interests lie in machine learning, statistics, sequential decision making, imitation learning, and engineering these tools to empower and amplify humans. Matt has a MS from CMU, a BS from Penn State and is a former NSF Graduate Research Fellow.
Fereshteh Sadeghi
Fereshteh Sadeghi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington working with Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa. She completed her PhD at University of Washington where she worked on domain invariant vision-based policy learning for robotics. Her research is focused on developing learning algorithms that combine perception and control for learning robot skills. Fereshteh is interested in how learning can be used to enable machines acquire behavioral skills that can generalize to unstructured real world settings. During her PhD, she developed techniques for learning highly generalizable vision-based robot controllers in simulation for efficient transfer and adaptability to the real world. Fereshteh is a former NVIDIA Graduate Research Fellow.
Christoforos Mavrogiannis
Christoforos (Chris) Mavrogiannis is a postdoctoral research associate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Srinivasa. He completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University, under the supervision of Prof. Ross A. Knepper. His thesis focused on the design and evaluation of planning algorithms for socially competent robot navigation in crowded human environments. He is broadly interested in algorithmic aspects of robotics, with a particular emphasis on motion planning for human-robot interaction applications. He is passionate about enabling robots to integrate seamlessly in human environments.
Gilwoo Lee
Gilwoo Lee is a PhD student at UW advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa. Her research interests are manipulation and reinforcement learning. Gilwoo has received B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics and M.Eng. in Computer Science from MIT, and has received M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Gilwoo has previously worked as a technical director at Dreamworks Animation Studios, a research associate at Canon Headquarters and Disney Animation Studios, and a PhD research intern at Oculus Research Pittsburgh. She's a recepient of Samsung Scholarship (2006-2010), Kwanjeong Scholarship (2015-current), and CMU's Presidential Fellowship (2017).
Brian Hou
Brian Hou is a PhD student at the University of Washington working with Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and manipulation. Brian received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley, and started his PhD at the Robotics Institute before joining the University of Washington. He is supported by the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship.
Aditya Mandalika
Aditya is a PhD student advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa. His current research interests include mechanics, control and motion planning of robot manipulators and mobile robots. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Madras with a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering. He has previously been at the Robotics Insitute, CMU as an MS student, and worked as a Research Assistant at the Personal Robotics Lab, CMU.
Sherdil Niyaz
Sherdil Niyaz received a B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2017, where he researched grasping in the AUTOLAB with Prof. Ken Goldberg. He is currently a first year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa on motion planning.
Liyiming Ke
Liyiming "Kay" Ke is a PhD student at UW advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa. She is interested in reinforcement learning and applications of artificial intelligence. Kay earned B.S. with honor in Computer Science and Economics from Vanderbilt University.
William Agnew
William Agnew is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Washington. He is advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa and Pedro Domingos and supported by a NDSEG Fellowship. He researches reinforcement learning and planning with applications to robotics and NLP. He obtained a Bachelors in Discrete Mathematics from Georgia Tech.
Patrick Lancaster
Patrick Lancaster is a PhD student at the University of Washington working with Siddhartha Srinivasa and Joshua Smith. His research focuses on the creation of novel sensors for robot end-effectors, as well as how robots can use them to improve manipulation.
Matt Schmittle
Matt Schmittle is a PhD sudent at the University of Washington advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa and Dieter Fox. His research interests are in mobile robotics, vision, learning, and navigation. Matt earned his B.S. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Delaware. He has previously worked as a research intern in GRASP Lab at UPenn.
Ethan Gordon
Ethan Gordon is a PhD student at the University of Washington advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research interests are in physics-based manipulation, vision, and ML applied to assistive robotics. Ethan earned his B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. He has previously worked at Oculus VR on varifocal displays.
Johan Michalove
Johan Michalove is a BS/MS student at the Allen School of the University of Washington advised by Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research focuses on problems at the intersection of machine intelligence, model-based control and AI Ethics. He also actively works on the implementation and design of the system's architecture for MuSHR. He has previously worked on the Mars Science Laboratory and M2020 Rover Missions at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and obtained a B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Washington both with Departmental Honors.
Colin Summers
Colin Summers is a BS/MS student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and is advised by Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa. He is primarily interested in algorithms that enable intelligent machines to acquire general notions of intelligence in order to robustly solve complex and temporally-extended tasks in real-world settings. He is co-advised by Prof. Dieter Fox in the Robotics and State Estimation Lab and has previously interned at NASA JPL Robotics, NASA Glenn Research Center, and Blue Origin.
Rosario Scalise
Rosario Scalise is a research scientist in the Personal Robotics Lab. His research focuses on natural language interaction in collaborative human-robot systems and enabling transparency in AI decision-making. He also does system integration for the robots and makes messes for HERB to clean up. He previously obtained B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from the University of Connecticut and an M.S. in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Alumni
Students
- Jeongseok Lee
- MS 2018, now Engineer at Amazon
- Laura Herlant
- PhD 2018, now Senior Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot
- Zita Marinho
- PhD 2018, now Research Scientist at Sacoor Brothers
- Stefanos Nikolaidis
- PhD 2018, now Assistant Professor at USC
- Shervin Javdani
- PhD 2017, now Researcher at Aurora
- Shushman Choudhury
- MS 2017, now PhD at Stanford
- Shen Li
- MS 2017, now PhD at MIT
- Jennifer King
- PhD 2016, now Reseacher at Berkshire Grey
- Michael Koval
- PhD 2016, now Researcher at Waymo
- Chris Dellin
- PhD 2016, now Reseacher at Nuro
- Matt Klingensmith
- PhD 2016, now Engineer at Boston Dynamics
- Aaron Walsman
- MS 2015, now PhD at UW
- Anca Dragan
- PhD 2015, now Assistant Professor at Berkeley
- Elizabeth Cha
- MS 2014, now PhD at USC
- Mehmet Dogar
- PhD 2013, now Assistant Professor at University of Leeds
- Kyle Strabala
- MS 2012, now Scientist at Near Earth Autonomy
- Alvaro Collet
- PhD 2012, now Research Scientist at Facebook
- Dmitry Berenson
- PhD 2011, now Assistant Professor at Michigan
- Garratt Gallagher
- MS 2009, now at Google Robotics
- Martin Herrmann
- MS 2009, now at TU Braunschweig
Postdoctoral Fellows
- Daqing Yi
- 2016-2018, now Researcher at Google
- Henny Admoni
- 2015-2017, now Assistant Professor at CMU
- Aaron Johnson
- 2015-2016, now Assistant Professor at CMU
Research Staff
- Youngsun Kim
- 2017-2019, now at Amazon
- Hanjun Song
- 2016-2019, now PhD at MIT