Nikhil Chavan-Dafle
Enabling robots to interact with the world.
 🧠AI & Robotics 🤖
 Samsung AI | MIT | CMU
My work focuses on building scene understanding and manipulation dexterity for robotics applications. These versatile and robust skills will soon allow us to deploy cognizant robots in factories, warehouses, and fields, and even helping us in our homes, hospitals, and public spaces.
At Samsung AI, I lead a team of researchers and engineers to develop perception technologies for robot behaviors. I completed my PhD from MIT and masters from Carnegie Mellon, where I built expertise in manipulation planning, reactive control, and robot learning. I was responsible for grasp and motion planning for MIT’s Amazon Robotics Challenge winning team. My work has received Best Student Paper award at RSS 2018, Amazon Robotics Best Systems Paper Award in Manipulation, and Best Video Award Finalist at ICRA 2014.
news
Jan 29, 2024 | All 1, 2, 3 papers of my team are accepted to ICRA 2024 |
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Dec 12, 2023 | Our work on zero-shot scene reconstruction using large VLM was granted a Strategically Important Patent |
Nov 18, 2023 | Introducing FineControlNet - our work on Conditional Gen-AI |
Oct 31, 2023 | Our work on improved LiDAR map generation was approved for Tech Transfer |