Laura Dodds

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About

Laura Dodds is a roboticist advancing the frontier of mechanical search—the challenge of retrieving occluded objects using robots. Her core research lies at the intersection of robotics, multi-modal perception, and manipulation, with a particular focus on integrating radio frequency (RF) sensing with computer vision. Dodds’s major contribution is the development of **FuseBot**, a novel system that fuses RF and visual data to locate and retrieve both rigid and deformable objects hidden from a robot’s camera. Unlike traditional methods that rely on slow, exhaustive search or require objects to be tagged, FuseBot leverages RF signals to rapidly narrow the search space, dramatically improving efficiency and success rates. Her work, presented in two highly-cited papers (2022 and 2023), has garnered early attention for its practical impact on warehouse automation, disaster response, and assistive robotics. By enabling robots to “see” through clutter without expensive hardware, Dodds is pioneering a more robust, real-world approach to robotic perception and manipulation. Her research promises to make autonomous retrieval faster, cheaper, and more reliable in complex environments.