I am a Roboticist and Senior Research Scientist at the Toyota Research Institute, Cambridge MA, USA working within the Manipulation (Robotics Research) Group under Russ Tedrake. My cu
rrent research interests are in tactile-perception and control, and soft-robotics for robust manipulation in homes.
I am the lead researcher in a team investigating soft/tactile sensors for robust and perceptive manipulation in cluttered home environments. I have also been a sporadic contributor the Drake simulation library and toolbox.
Prior to my current position, I have been a visiting researcher with the Robotics and Perception Group of the University of Zürich, working with Prof. Davide Scaramuzza on quadrotor trajectory optimization, and a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genova in the Dynamic Interaction Control Group where I worked on tactile sensing and state estimation for humanoids and humans.
I hold a PhD from the University of Zürich, Switzerland, an MS from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea and a BE from the Anna University, Chennai. During my PhD, I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich, with a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher Fellowship. I have also been a R&D Engineer at Yujin Robot Co. Ltd, a consumer robotics company based in Seoul, South Korea and did my Master’s research at the Robot Intelligence Technology (RIT) Lab of KAIST. In addition to some of these roles, I also served as the Project Manager for DWENGO pzw, a STEM education focused non-profit taking robotics and micro-controller programming to under-privileged children worldwide.
I am a firm believer in TRI’s mission to develop technologies that improve the quality of human life and extend our independence, particularly in the case of the elderly and the infirm, through developing robotics technology that facilitate ageing-in-place. I strongly feel that the path to functional robots in our lives is for robots to be “good enough”. i.e. cope with the complications due to reality by strategies that are not too dissimilar to those employed by living beings. While my doctoral research focused on dimensionality reduction – i.e. coping with complexity through mathematically feasible simplifications, my current research at TRI is instead aimed at coping with uncertainties in manipulation through a combination of softness throughout the mechanical embodiment coupled with high-fidelity tactile sensing – a combination that I believe to be advantageous in highly cluttered environments like our homes. I also do believe we are well beyond the point where a successful robotics solution can be dominated by mastery in any one sub-discipline and that holistic development is key, i.e simultaneous development in all aspects of a robot such as in controls, planning, estimation, learning, reasoning and cognition, and human interaction to name a few. This also necessitates a large degree of cooperation between roboticists towards achieving such capabilities – something I have always striven to do. As a scientist myself, I sincerely believe that all of this research is fundamentally and necessarily tied back into natural sciences – i.e. into the fundamental questions of understanding why are living beings the way they are – both as a source of inspiration to robotics and as a conclusion from our insight gained on synthetic machines. Thus, I believe that roboticist must never lose sight of the natural reality around themselves.
Naveen Kuppuswamy 