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).
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.
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 (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 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 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 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 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 "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 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 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 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 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.
Amal Nanavati is a PhD student at the University of Washington advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa and Maya Cakmak. His research interests are in lifelong robot learning, human-robot interaction, and multiparty interactions. Amal earned his B.S. in Computer Science with an additional major in Global Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously worked as a research student at the HRI Laboratory at Kyoto University, Japan.
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 has previously interned at NASA JPL Robotics, NASA Glenn Research Center, and Blue Origin.
Matthew Rockett is a BS/MS student at the Unversity of Washington advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa. He is interested in mobile robotics, planning, and multi-agent robotic systems. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.
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.