Vaibhav Unhelkar (M.Tech. ’12, IIT Bombay) is a PhD student with the
Interactive Robotics Group since Spring 2013. At IRG, he is developing
an autonomous Mobile Robotic Assistant for assembly line environments.
His research interests include estimation, controls and learning as
applied to both interactive and autonomous systems, such as,
human-robot scenarios, aircrafts, space vehicles and other stochastic
systems.

Prior to joining IRG, Vaibhav was a researcher with the Dynamics and
Controls group at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Bombay,
where his work focused on System Identification of miniature aerial
vehicles. As a student at IIT Bombay, he worked on spacecraft attitude
estimation, and GPS-INS integration for his Master’s and Bachelor’s
thesis, respectively. He has also had experience working as an
engineer with Pratham (cube-sat team of IIT Bombay) and Turbomeca
(leading European manufacturer of helicopter engines). Apart from
engineering, he also cherishes interesting conversations, the works of
Isaac Asimov, and instrumental music.

I am a PhD student in the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT in the Department of Electric Engineering and Computer Science and CSAIL. My research is focused on perception and path planning methods for teleoperation under time delay where an intelligent blend between autonomy and human control is required for performing complex tasks in real scenarios. These teleoperation strategies are intended to be applied in field robotics, medical devices, remote manipulation and space robotics.

I am currently a member of the MIT Team for the DARPA Robotics Challenge and the ONR Project for field robotics.

Prior to joining the IRG I worked in the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela where I hold an Assistant Professorship in the Electronics and Circuits Department and the Mechatronics Research Group where I have worked in mobile robotics, computer vision, teleoperation, UAVs navigation, state estimation for inertial navigation and ITS.

Pem was born in the small town of Strzyżów, Poland, where he spent his early childhood. He then moved to New Jersey, USA. After finishing up his primary education, Pem went on to study engineering at Rutgers University, graduating with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2012. During his years at Rutgers, Pem researched construction of primary bases on the Moon and Mars as part of the NJSGC/NASA Summer Research Fellowship program and then as a member of the Manned Space Exploration group. In the summer of 2011, Pem interned with NASA through the NYCRI Research Internship program, researching the development of an autonomous convoy of cars.

Pem is currently combining his research interests in space and autonomy as a member of the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT, where he does work on space robotics.His research focuses on developing a simulation of a space environment in which astronauts and autonomous robots work together on tasks such as construction, assembly, and maintenance of a lunar radio telescope.

Hi, my name is Joseph Kim, a M.S. candidate in MIT’s Aero/Astro department. I grew up in north suburbs of Chicago and completed my undergraduate degree at UIUC majoring in Aerospace Engineering. At UIUC, I built agile micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) to perform a robotic perching maneuver. Also, I was heavily involved as a resident advisor and as a tutor for high school students.

Here at IRG, I am working in a field of human-robot interaction, specifically in the development of an intelligent agent that would actively participate in human meetings. The agent would assist meetings by analyzing human agreement process, providing relevant information in real-time, and producing a summary in the end highlighting key topics.

In my free time, I enjoy playing basketball, chess, and guitar~

I am a Postdoctoral Associate with the Interactive Robotics Group as part of CSAIL. I am currently the lead researcher on a project funded by BMW that investigates developing and deploying mobile robot assistants in the final assembly of automotive manufacturing processes to increase the productivity, safety, and health of human workers. More generally, I am interested in using ideas from AI and robotics to improve the coordination of teams of agents, including human, virtual, and embodied agents. My goal is to develop techniques that augment human’s own cognitive and physical abilities to create integrated human-robot teams that are more capable than their individual counterparts.

My research interests include distributed constraint reasoning, multiagent coordination, automated planning and scheduling, temporal reasoning, and human-agent interaction. Prior to joining the IRG, I completed my PhD work at the University of Michigan, developing distributed approaches for constraint-based, multiagent scheduling. Visit my homepage to learn more!

I am a Ph.D candidate in Interactive Robotics Group in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and CSAIL. I am interested in exploiting the underlying characteristics and assumptions of human-robot interaction problems when applying machine learning techniques. Current topics include improvement of efficiency and accuracy of human-robot team planning.

Prior to joining the lab, I was working as a software engineer at the MathWorks, where I enjoyed free copies of MATLAB, free breakfast and coffee, while developing how MATLAB interfaces with C/C++ in my spare time.

Prior to MathWorks, I earned a masters degree in MIT focusing on multi-agent simultaneous localization and mapping, where I enjoyed building my robot and gained hands-on experience (a.k.a. how often sensors can break when you are about to perform demos).

Emily was born in the much sunnier climes of Annapolis, Maryland, where she spent the first 22 years of her life before being banished to the Far North under a cloud of secrecy. She spent as much time in the sun and on the water as she could before arriving — from Brazil to Bermuda to, sadly,  Newport.  Alas, she could not escape her fate, and she now splits her time between the Operations Research Center, the Draper Laboratory, and, of course, IRGAMIT.

Research Subject: Dynamic Scheduling with Imperfect Knowledge
Emily is researching methods of enabling underwater unmanned vehicles, given a set of user inputs, to select a set of tasks to carry out and to generate a consistent schedule to do so.  Her work focuses on areas where the user has imperfect knowledge of the environment and the tasks, and so requires the use of probabilistic modeling to determine likelihood of success of a given schedule.

Ron grew up on Long Island, New York.  He went to The College of William and Mary where he studied physics and did research on properties of the pion within a model of Quantum Chromodynamics called Holographic QCD (or AdS/QCD).  During the summer of 2010, he interned at Brookhaven National Lab working on sensors for the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider there.  In the summer of 2011, he worked for Estee Lauder in their process engineering department. He then moved on to MIT where he now resides.  Ron is pursuing a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Research Interests:

• Dynamic Scheduling
• Human-Robot Collaboration
• Robotic Mechanical Design

Interactive Robotics Group – Man Vehicle Lab; CSAIL

MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

B.S. Mechanical Engineering, 2011, Johns Hopkins University

This is a picture of me during my first flight as a private pilot. My experience as a pilot has cultivated a desire to improve interactions between humans and autonomous systems.

Specialization and Research Interests:

• Autonomous systems
• Hybrid dynamical systems
• Dynamic scheduling
• Manufacturing
• Human-robot interaction
• Assistive medical technologies

Positions Held Elsewhere:

• Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Space Department: Intern, June 2010-April 2011
• Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab National Security Analysis Department: Intern, June 2009-April 2010

Society Memberships:

• Tau Beta Pi
• Pi Tau Sigma
• American Institute Aeronautics and Astronautics
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers
• National Eagle Scout Association

Stefanos was born in Athens, Greece, where he studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (Dipl. Eng., 2006).  He then moved to Japan to do research in Robotics at the University of Tokyo (M.Eng., 2009). He later worked at Square-Enix video-game company in Tokyo for two years, before joining IRG@MIT as a PhD student. He is doing research in human and robot team coordination for efficient task execution under time pressure.