Personal Robotics Lab

Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He founded the Personal Robotics Lab, leads the Mobility and Manipulation Thrust at the Quality of Life NSF ERC, and co-directs the Manipulation Lab at CMU. Dr. Srinivasa's research focus is on developing perception, planning, and learning algorithms that enable robots to accomplish useful manipulation tasks in dynamic and cluttered indoor environments.

Mehmet Dogar is a PhD student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His interests include manipulation, grasping, and humanoid robotics. Mehmet received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, in Computer Engineering.

Anca Dragan is a PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon working with Siddhartha Srinivasa. Her research focus is on planning in high dimensional spaces and the idea of learning from experience in this context. Anca was born in Romania and graduated from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.

Shervin Javdani is a PhD student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon working with Drew Bagnell and Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research focuses on the use of force and tactile sensing to reduce uncertainty for manipulation. Shervin graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Michael Koval is a PhD student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon working with Nancy Pollard and Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research focuses on the use tactile sensing to manipulate objects under uncertainty. Michael graduated from the Rutgers University with a double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science.

Mike Vande Weghe has worked for over ten years in mechanical, electrical, and software development at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is presently a Senior Research Engineer at the Robotics Institute. Mike is responsible for hardware development, robot control, and software infrastructure on HERB. Before coming to CMU, Mike worked for Parlance Corporation and BBN on realtime computer speech recognition, and for Lutron Electronics on high-frequency switching power systems. Mike has an SB in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a MS in Robotics from CMU.

Pras Velagapudi is a Project Scientist in the Robotics Institute currently working with several robots including HERB. His focus is on robust perception and planning under uncertainty for single and multiple robots. Over the past decade, Pras has worked on a range of projects from art to fieldable systems, spanning autonomous land, air, and sea vehicles. Pras has a PhD and MS in Robotics and a BS in ECE and CS from CMU.

Bryan Hood is a PhD student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He works with Chris Atkeson and Siddartha Srinivasa. Bryan graduated from University of Florida with a bachelors in Electrical Engineering and a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering.