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.

Alvaro Collet is a PhD student in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University working with Martial Hebert and Siddhartha Srinivasa. He is the primary computer vision researcher on the Personal Robotics project at Intel Labs Pittsburgh. His interests include vision for manipulation, active sensing, object recognition, and sensor fusion. Alvaro graduated from Universitat Ramon Llull in 2005 with a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 with a M.S. in Robotics.

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.

Kyle Strabala is a PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon working with Siddhartha Srinivasa. His research focus is on enabling robots and humans to collaborate to perform manipulation tasks.

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.

Alex Zirvel is an undergraduate student studying Computer Science and Robotics. His interests include robotic manipulation and computer vision, as well as other areas of AI such as motion planning.

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.