Papers
15
Total Citations
358
H-Index
9
About
Krishna Shankar is a robotics researcher whose work centers on mobile manipulation, legged locomotion, and autonomous systems operating in complex, unstructured environments. He is perhaps best known for his foundational contributions to the RoboSimian project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — a quadrupedal robot with generalized limbs enabling both dexterous manipulation and versatile mobility across difficult terrain. His 2015 paper introducing RoboSimian's hardware design and algorithms has garnered 130 citations, establishing it as a landmark reference in the field. Shankar played a key role in Team RoboSimian's 5th place finish at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, documenting the team's semi-autonomous architecture in a paper that has since accumulated 86 citations. His research extends beyond competition robotics into practical real-world applications, including one-shot imitation learning for household manipulation tasks and a metrics-driven mobile manipulation system benchmarked in live grocery store environments. His broader technical contributions span quadratic programming for whole-body control, learning-based motion planning, and supervised autonomy frameworks. Across more than a decade of research, Shankar has helped shape the theoretical and practical foundations of capable, generalizable robotic manipulation systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 4A Mobile Manipulation System for One-Shot Teaching of Complex Tasks in Homes21 citations · 2020
- 5A Quadratic Programming Approach to Quasi-Static Whole-Body Manipulation21 citations · 2015
- 6Learning an Optimal Sampling Distribution for Efficient Motion Planning19 citations · 2020
- 7Demonstrating Mobile Manipulation in the Wild: A Metrics-Driven Approach13 citations · 2023
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