Matei Ciocarlie

Matei Ciocarlie's main interest is in reliable robotic performance in unstructured, human environments, focusing on areas such as novel robotic hand designs and control, autonomous and Human-in-the-Loop mobile manipulation, shared autonomy, teleoperation, and assistive robotics. He is also interested in novel hand designs that combine mechanical and computational intelligence, and make use or tactile, proprioceptive or range sensing in novel ways.

Matei's background includes both academic and industrial research, focusing on applications that are practical today and advances that might open new domains in the future. Matei completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York; his doctoral dissertation, focused on reducing the computational complexity associated with dexterous robotic grasping, was the winner of the 2010 Robotdalen Scientific Award. Before joining the Mechanical Engineering faculty at Columbia, Matei was a Research Scientist and then Group Manager at Willow Garage, Inc., a privately funded Silicon Valley robotics research lab, and then a Senior Research Scientist at Google, Inc. In these positions, Matei contributed to the development of the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS), and led research projects in areas such as hand design, manipulation under uncertainty, and assistive robotics. In recognition of his work, Matei was awarded the 2013 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award.