Meet the Experts in Algorithmic Robotics & Motion Planning

Multidisciplinary Excellence in Robotics

"Algorithmic robotics" isn't a slogan—it's the uncomfortable middle ground between theory that should work and systems that actually do.

We keep the team intentionally mixed: motion planning researchers who care about asymptotic behavior, systems engineers who care about latency, and perception specialists who care about what the sensors can realistically support. That mix matters most when a planner looks clean on paper but collapses under contact, drift, or timing jitter.

Our default workflow is simple: define the constraint, encode it, and then try to break it in simulation before we trust it on hardware.

Principal Investigator

Kostas Bekris

Principal Investigator

Kostas Bekris oversees the development of foundational algorithms for motion planning and robotic manipulation.

Senior Research Scientists & Engineers

This group is where ideas get stress-tested: high-dimensional planning, real-time optimization, scalable sampling, and perception that respects physics.

Andrew Dobson

Senior Research Scientist

Andrew Dobson specializes in the empirical validation of motion planning algorithms within high-dimensional configuration spaces.

Andrew Kimmel

Lead Systems Architect

Andrew Kimmel drives the development of real-time trajectory optimization for autonomous navigation systems.

Zakary Littlefield

Senior Research Engineer

Zakary Littlefield develops scalable sampling-based planning algorithms for complex robotic systems.

David Surovik

Senior Perception Engineer

David Surovik specializes in integrating physics-based constraints into robotic perception and sensor fusion pipelines.

Athanasios Krontiris

Principal Robotics Engineer

Athanasios Krontiris leads research into decentralized multi-agent systems and formal verification of robotic protocols.

Research Associates & Specialists

These roles keep the lab honest: they chase the edge cases and connect planning to dynamics, stability, and domain-specific constraints.

Isaac Yochelson

Research Associate

Isaac Yochelson investigates the impact of kinodynamic constraints on the stability of autonomous systems.

Min Zhao

Computational Biomechanics Researcher

Min Zhao applies algorithmic robotics principles to the modeling of complex biological systems and surgical automation.

Collaborative Scope & Extended Network

Robotics research rarely stays inside one lab boundary; the hard problems force you to borrow tools and share infrastructure.

We work across motion planning, autonomous navigation, manipulation, and computational biomedicine, depending on what the problem demands. Some projects are tightly coupled to a specific platform; others are algorithm-first and only later get mapped onto hardware constraints.

A practical note: results can hinge on the robot model fidelity and the sensing stack, so we document assumptions early and revisit them when the platform changes.

Join Our Research

If you like debugging the gap between "should work" and "works every time," you'll fit in here.

We're most productive with people who can write clearly about constraints, defend design choices, and run careful experiments. Bring a concrete question you want to answer—then expect to spend time on the unglamorous parts: instrumentation, ablations, and reproducing failures.