Benjamin Pitzer

About

Benjamin Pitzer’s research sits at the intersection of robotic manipulation, human-robot interaction, and accessible robotics infrastructure. He is best known for pioneering Rosbridge (201 citations), a protocol that opened ROS to non-ROS users and enabled web-based robot control—a foundational contribution to cloud robotics and reproducible experimentation. His work on Semantic Object Maps (90 citations) provided service robots with rich, task-relevant environmental knowledge for autonomous kitchen manipulation, while his bimanual cloth manipulation system (58 citations) tackled the notoriously difficult problem of deformable-object handling for laundry folding. Pitzer also advanced remote robotics through the PR2 Remote Lab (46 citations), allowing distributed teams to conduct state-of-the-art experiments, and explored perceptual shared autonomy (45 citations) to improve robot reliability during complex tasks like dishwasher loading. His contributions to low-cost manipulator state estimation (36 citations) further supported practical deployment in unstructured environments. By bridging web technologies, semantic mapping, and deformable-object manipulation, Pitzer’s work has enabled more accessible, robust, and capable personal robots—directly influencing how researchers build and share robotic systems today.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Rosbridge: ROS for Non-ROS Users

   201 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Semantic Object Maps for robotic housework - representation, acquisition and use

   90 citations · 2012
3. 3
   Bimanual robotic cloth manipulation for laundry folding

   58 citations · 2011
4. 4
   Robots as web services: Reproducible experimentation and application development using rosjs

   56 citations · 2011
5. 5
   Bimanual robotic cloth manipulation for laundry folding

   54 citations · 2011
6. 6
   PR2 Remote Lab: An environment for remote development and experimentation

   46 citations · 2012
7. 7
   Towards perceptual shared autonomy for robotic mobile manipulation

   45 citations · 2011
8. 8
   Manipulator state estimation with low cost accelerometers and gyroscopes

   36 citations · 2012
9. 9
   Remote Robotic Laboratories for Learning from Demonstration

   31 citations · 2012
10. 10
    Failure recovery with shared autonomy

    9 citations · 2012

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links