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Ahalya Prabhakar

Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist

Yale University

Biography

I am a Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist at Yale University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. My work focuses on developing learning and control algorithms for efficient human-robot interaction. Prior to Yale, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Learning Algorithms and Systems (LASA) lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) under Prof. Aude Billard, where I worked on developing algorithms for multimodal sensory learning for safe manipulation and adaptive safety controllers for human-robot collaboration. I obtained my Ph.D. in Robotics at Northwestern University in Prof. Todd Murphey’s lab. My Ph.D. work centered on developing information communication algorithms to enable intuitive human-robot collaboration and efficient robot learning using distribution-based motion representations and information-theoretic measures. I led Northwestern’s team for the DARPA OFFSET Urban Swarm Challenge, developing autonomous swarm algorithms for shared human-swarm collaboration and exploring their efficacy in aiding task performance under dynamic, time-sensitive constraints.

Interests

  • Human-Robot Collaboration and Learning
  • Sensor Modeling and Learning
  • Information-Theoretic Algorithms
  • High-Dimensional Robot Learning

Education

  • PhD in Mechanical Engineering, 2020

    Northwestern University

  • MSc in Mechanical Engineering, 2016

    Northwestern University

  • BSc in Mechanical Engineering, 2013

    California Institute of Technology

Projects

Learning Interpretable Action-Perception Models

As robotic systems are deployed with varying sensor modalities, especially in novel scenarios, it is important for the robot to build …

Optimal Interface Design for Human-Robot Collaboration

Designing interpretable, multimodal interfaces for intuitive human-robot interaction and collaboration

Principled Methods for Human-Robot Collaborative Learning and Control

Enabling seamless human-robot collaboration while ensuring task success requires the reduction of the task information to its essential …

Recent Publications

A Predictive Model for Tactile Force Estimation using Audio-Tactile Data

Robust in-hand manipulation of objects with movable content requires estimation and prediction of the contents’ motion with …

Active Exploration for Real-Time Haptic Training

Tactile perception is important for robotic systems that interact with the world through touch. Touch is an active sense in which …

Collaborative robots can augment human cognition in regret-sensitive tasks

Despite theoretical benefits of collaborative robots, disappointing outcomes are well documented by clinical studies, spanning …

Measuring Human-Robot Team Benefits Under Time Pressure in a Virtual Reality Testbed

During a natural disaster such as hurricane, earthquake, or fre, robots have the potential to explore vast areas and provide valuable …

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