Matei Ciocarlie - Research Scientist
Dr. Matei Ciocarlie is a Research Scientist at Willow Garage, focusing on grasping, manipulation and perception. He is currently developing algorithms for grasping known or novel objects using the PR2 robot. His main interest is in reliable performance in unstructured, human environments. To achieve this goal, he is investigating multiple directions, such as object recognition for grasping known objects, recognition of graspable features in sensor data, and passively adaptive hand designs that allow part of the effort of finding a stable grasp to be performed at a mechanical, rather than computational level.
Matei earned his B.S.Eng. from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, then completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University in New York, where he was a member of the Robotics Group. His thesis, "Low-dimensional Robotic Grasping: Eigengrasp Subspaces and Adaptive Underactuation", focuses on the following central question: how do we reduce the complexity of robotic grasping without compromising versatility? The thesis proposes using low-dimensional hand posture subspaces, that can act as planning spaces (for dexterous robotic hands), interaction spaces (for hand prosthetics) and design spaces (for adaptive underactuated hands).
