Papers
23
Total Citations
770
H-Index
15
About
Max Bajracharya is a pioneering robotics researcher whose work spans autonomous navigation, dexterous manipulation, and legged robotics systems. Based primarily at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), his research has profoundly shaped how robots perceive, move through, and interact with complex, unstructured environments. Bajracharya's early contributions include co-developing CLARAty (Coupled Layered Architecture for Robotic Autonomy), a reusable software framework that standardized robotic component integration across heterogeneous platforms, earning over 100 citations and influencing a generation of autonomous systems. His work on end-to-end learning for off-road navigation under the DARPA LAGR program demonstrated how robots could adaptively classify terrain in real time using multimodal sensing—a landmark achievement with 84 citations. He is perhaps best known for his central role in developing RoboSimian, JPL's quadrupedal robot capable of both mobility and dexterous manipulation in disaster scenarios, accumulating 130 citations. His complementary research into 6-DOF pose estimation for legged robots in GPS-denied environments and all-hours thermal infrared navigation further established his expertise in robust, field-deployable autonomy. Across his career, Bajracharya has consistently bridged perception, planning, and hardware—making him an indispensable figure in practical field robotics research.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2CLARAty: an architecture for reusable robotic software108 citations · 2003
- 3Autonomous off‐road navigation with end‐to‐end learning for the LAGR program84 citations · 2008
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- 5Unmanned ground vehicle perception using thermal infrared cameras52 citations · 2011
- 6
- 7End-to-end dexterous manipulation with deliberate interactive estimation45 citations · 2012
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