Ashutosh Saxena

4159 Upson Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853.
Tel: (607)255-7017, Fax: (607)255-4428
asaxena at cs.cornell dot edu

How can robots operate autonomously in unstructured environments? I design learning algorithms to help robots perceive the environments so that they can perform tasks such as open doors, pick up novel objects, unload items from a dishwasher, fly around without crashing into obstacles, and more.

I am also interested in developing new machine learning algorithms, especially ones that can handle high-dimensionality of the perceptual space (e.g., CRFs), while also considering the actions in time (e.g., reinforcement learning).

Getting involved:

Undergraduates at Cornell: Please first send me an email with your resume and transcript; you must know C, C++ or C# and have a GPA of 3.7 or above. Sophomores and juniors CS/ECE are especially encouraged to apply.

PhD students (CS, ECE and MAE) at Cornell: Please email me for an appointment!

Students not at Cornell: Please go through our admissions first.

Postdoc position available: vision for robotics, machine learning, aerial robotics.

Prof. Saxena is named a co-chair of the IEEE Technical committee on robot learning.

Prof. Saxena won Google faculty research award, IARPA Finder, and others.

Yun Jiang's work in placing new objects was accepted in IJRR.

Three papers (Sung/Ponce's, Jiang/Amend's, and Jiang/Lim/Zheng's) and Jiang/Basu's video accepted to ICRA 2012.

Anand/Koppula and Congcong Li presented their respective papers at NIPS 2011.

Anand/Koppula's work featured in New Scientist. Jae Sung's work featured in R&D Magazine.

Li/Kowdle's paper on FeCCM was accepted in IEEE TPAMI.

Jiang/Zheng/Lim, Labutov/Yosinski, Yang/Low/Cong, Ly, and Anand/Koppula to present their respective works at the RSS workshops in Los Angeles.

See cool Robot projects and the videos from CS4758!. Described in Cornell Chronicle article. (See video. see photos)

Ashutosh Saxena is a Sloan Research Fellow. (New York Times ad.)

Cornell's Personal Robotics group in the Communications of the ACM and others.

Congcong Li, TP Wong and Norris Xu build a "shoe finder robot" in a day using FeCCMs, featured in ICRA 2011 videos. (More) Also mentioned in New Scientist.

Zhaoyin Jia's paper on robotic object detection was accepted in IJCAI 2011.

Yun Jiang and Moseson's paper on grasping, and Bills and Chen's paper on vision-based aerial navigation were accepted in ICRA 2011.

Congcong Li and Adarsh Kowdle's paper on Holistic Scene Understanding was published in NIPS 2010 and ECCV workshop on parts and attributes. (More)

Nan Rong's presented her paper on MDPs with Unawareness in UAI 2010.

IYB middle school students control robots!

Make3D and Grasping featured in Nilsson's book "The Quest for Artificial Intelligence", that promises to be a definitive history of the field.

Work on robotic grasping featured in Discovery Science Channel on Jan 19, 2009 (10pm EST). And also on CBS WBNG-7 News.