Siddhartha Srinivasa Associate Professor The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Administrative Assistant: Jean Harpley

I work on manipulation. My goal is to enable robots to robustly and gracefully interact with the world to perform complex manipulation tasks in uncertain, unstructured, and cluttered environments. I want to make this interaction faster, safer, elegant, and involve simpler actuation. To this end, I founded and direct the Personal Robotics Lab, co-direct the Manipulation Lab, and lead the HERB effort of the QoLTbots systems area and the Mobile Manipulation effort of the Mobility and Manipulation Thrust at the Quality of Life Technologies NSF ERC.

I am currently focussing on two topics: Physics-based Manipulation and The Mathematics of Human-Robot Interaction. They are heavily intertwined, both born out of the goal of robots performing complex manipulation tasks with and around people.

Physics-based Manipulation: I focus on using physics in the design of actions, algorithms, and hands for manipulation:

• Manipulation is more than pick-and-place. We are developing nonprehensile physics-based actions and algorithms to reconfigure clutter in the way of the primary task by pulling, pushing, sweeping, and sliding it out of the way. We have also recently shown that a class of tactile localization problems can be formulated to be submodular.
• I am particularly fond of functional gradient methods which have been used with much success in physics. We have developed CHOMP, a functional gradient optimizer for robot motion planning, and variants like GSCHOMP that exploit the structure of manipulation problems.
• I believe simple hands can do complex things. I am working on building robustness into the design and algorithms of simple hands, embracing physics and underactuation to stabilize objects.

The Mathematics of Human-Robot Interaction: I focus on formalizing Human-Robot Interaction principles using machine learning, motion planning, and function gradient algorithms:

• We have been working on enabling seamless and fluent human-robot handovers. We have developed a taxonomy of human and dog handovers, designed expressive grasps and motions, and used time-series analysis to learn the communication of intent. Our JHRI paper summarizes this work.
• We are formalizing assistive teleoperation, framing it as the joint tightly-coupled problem of prediction, solved with machine learning, and arbitration by policy blending, solved with control theory. We are also working on the online adaptation of teleoperation interfaces with kernel machines.
• Our latest work formalizes predictable and legible motion as inference problems, bringing together concepts in psychology, animation, and machine learning. We are presently working on generating legible motion via functional gradient optimization.

I am also interested in Manipulation Planning: extending randomized planners to constraint manifolds and Perception for Manipulation: my group has developed MOPED: an efficient object recognition and pose estimation system for manipulation.

Short Biography

I received a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1999, where I worked with Roddam Narasimha on applying wavelet transforms to Navier-Stokes equations to detect coherent structures in jet flow. I recieved my MS in 2001 and PhD in 2005 from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked with Mike Erdmann and Matt Mason at the Manipulation Lab. For my MS thesis, I built the Mobipulator, a desktop manipulator that used its wheels to manipulate everyday objects. For my PhD thesis, I built robust controllers for dynamic manipulation under Coulomb friction. I founded the Personal Robotics Lab (PRL) in 2006 where my students and I are developing perception, planning, and learning algorithms that enable robots to accomplish useful manipulation tasks in dynamic and cluttered indoor environments. I was also a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs Pittsburgh from 2006-11 where I started and led Intel's research efforts in robotics.

The Personal Robotics Lab

Full Publication list

Google Scholar page

Preprints

• Nothing presently.

Teaching

• 16-662 Robot Autonomy, Spring 2012, 2013
• 16-843 Manipulation Algorithms, Fall 2012
• 16-741 Mechanics of Manipulation, Spring 2009 (with Matt Mason)

Awards

• [NEW] RSS Best Paper Award Finalist 2013, Paper: Generating Legible Motion
• [NEW] RSS Early Career Spotlight Award, 2013
• [NEW] IEEE ICRA Best Manipulation Paper Award Finalist 2013, Paper: Efficient Touch Based Localization through Submodularity
• Okawa Foundation Research Grant 2012, Press Release
• RO-MAN Best Paper Award Finalist 2012, Paper: Online Customization of Teleoperation Interfaces
• Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award 2012, Press Release
• RSS Best Paper Award Finalist 2012, Paper: Formalizing Assistive Teleoperation
• RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award 2011: Mobile Manipulation
• IEEE IROS Best Paper Award Finalist 2010, Paper: Push-Grasping with Dexterous Hands: Mechanics and a Method
• ACM/IEEE HRI Best Paper Award Winner 2010, Paper: Gracefully mitigating breakdowns in robotic services
• IEEE ICRA Best Manipulation Paper Award Finalist 2010, Paper: Planning pre-grasp manipulation for transport tasks
• IEEE ICRA Best Vision Paper Award Finalist 2009, Paper: Object Recognition and Full Pose Registration from a Single Image for Robotic Manipulation

• Fastest advisor-student time, Random Distance Run, 2013
• Robotics Institute Cool Person of the Year Award, 2012

Professional Activities

• Founding Program Chair, Robotics Track AAAI 2012 (also Senior Program Committee member), 2013
• Founding Chair, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation 2010-2012
• Guest Editor, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Special Issue on Mobile Manipulation June 2012
• Area Chair, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2012 (also Publications Chair), 2011 (also Short Presentations Chair)
• Associate Editor, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010-
• Associate Editor, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011-
• Organizer, HRI 2013 Workshop on Collaborative Manipulation: New Challenges for Robotics and HRI
• Organizer, RSS 2012 Workshop on Robots in Clutter: Manipulation, Perception and Navigation in Human Environments
• Organizer, IEEE ICRA 2011 Workshop on Mobile Manipulation: Integrating Perception and Manipulation
• Organizer, RSS 2010 Workshop on Strategies and Evaluation for Mobile Manipulation in Household Environments
• Organizer, ICCV 2009 IEEE Workshop on Computer Vision for Humanoid Robots in Real Environments

Current Students

Graduated Students