Natasha Kholgade Banerjee
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Clarkson University, Wright State University
Papers
12
Total Citations
216
H-Index
5
About
Natasha Kholgade Banerjee is a robotics and human-robot interaction researcher whose work spans robot autonomy, perception, and the complex social dimensions of collaborative human-robot environments. She first gained significant recognition through her contributions to Team WPI-CMU's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where her team's safety-first approach to humanoid robot control — emphasizing failure prevention over reset recovery — earned 105 citations and demonstrated robust real-world robot deployment. Her parallel work on real-time 6DOF pose estimation for textureless objects (65 citations) advanced a critical capability in robot perception, enabling reliable object recognition from RGB and RGB-D imagery without reliance on surface texture. More recently, Banerjee has turned her attention to the human side of robotics, investigating how blue-collar workers across countries and genders perceive safety, autonomy, job security, trust, and privacy in human-robot collaboration. Her HOH Handover Dataset — featuring 136 objects and multimodal capture — represents a meaningful infrastructure contribution to data-driven handover research. Taken together, her body of work reflects a researcher who bridges technical robot capabilities with genuine concern for how humans experience and are affected by increasingly autonomous machines, making her scholarship valuable to engineers, social scientists, and policymakers alike.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1No falls, no resets: Reliable humanoid behavior in the DARPA robotics challenge105 citations · 2015
- 2Real-time scalable 6DOF pose estimation for textureless objects65 citations · 2016
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- 4Perception of Human-Robot Collaboration Across Countries and Job Domains6 citations · 2023
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