Hello! I am a fourth year Ph.D. student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and am advised by Prof. Oliver Kroemer.

My research interests lie in enabling robots to perform dynamic and interactive tasks using structural and algorithmic priors with the intent of learning stable dynamic models and optimal skills that generalize to more complex environments and tasks. My long-term goal is to develop control paradigms for assistive robotic systems in the real-world and equip robots with skills that demonstrate their ability to work alongside humans in an assistive and caregiving role. I believe that for real-world application of robotics in everyday tasks, it is imperative that we take inspiration from humans and develop systems and control methodologies that utilize robot full body dynamics and support from the environment while ensuring implicit metrics of safety.

Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Howie Choset and Dr. Matthew Travers on developing a belief space planning framework for utilizing contacts to reduce uncertainty by combining the exploration benefits of sampling-based methods and the exploitation benefits of optimization-based approaches.

Research

Dynamic Inference on Graphs using Structured Transition Models

Saumya Saxena and Oliver Kroemer. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oct 2022. [Link] [Video]

Search-Based Task Planning with Learned Skill Effect Models for Lifelong Robotic Manipulation

Jacky Liang, Mohit Sharma, Alex LaGrassa, Shivam Vats, Saumya Saxena and Oliver Kroemer. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2022. [Link] [Website]

Learning Reactive and Predictive Differentiable Controllers for Switching Linear Dynamical Models

Saumya Saxena, Alex LaGrassa and Oliver Kroemer. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2021. [Link] [Video]

Learning Active Task-Oriented Exploration Policies for Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap

Jacky Liang, Saumya Saxena, Oliver Kroemer. Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), July 2020. [Link] [Website]

A Real-time Augmented Reality Surgical System for Overlaying Stiffness Information

Nicolas Zevallos, Arun Srivatsan Rangaprasad, Hadi Salman, Lu Li, Jianing Qian, Saumya Saxena, Mengyun Xu, Kartik Patath and Howie Choset. Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), June 2018. [Link]

A surgical system for automatic registration, stiffness mapping and dynamic image overlay

Nicolas Zevallos, Arun Srivatsan Rangaprasad, Hadi Salman, Lu Li, Jianing Qian, Saumya Saxena, Mengyun Xu, Kartik Patath and Howie Choset. Proceedings of International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR), March 2018. [Link] [Video]

Technical Reports

Motion planning under uncertainty and sensing limitations using exploration versus exploitation

Saumya Saxena, Matthew Travers, Howie Choset. Masters Thesis report, August 2019. [Report]

Coverage Using Graph-based Motion Planning for Autonomous Exploration Of Non-uniform Environments

Saumya Saxena. May 2018. [Report] [Video1] [Video2]

CatAstroφ - Inertial reorientation of a freely falling cat using non-holonomic motion planning

Alexander Duncan, Andreas Fatschel, Dimitrios Nikitopoulos, Saumya Saxena, Steven Crews. May 2018. [Report] [Video]