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About

Neha Pusalkar is a robotics researcher whose work spans soft robotics, origami-inspired design, and autonomous decision-making under uncertainty. She is best known for pioneering a single-motor controlled, tendon-driven peristaltic soft origami robot—a design that marries the structural stiffness of origami paper folding with the flexibility needed for compliant locomotion. This work, published in 2018, has earned 79 citations and demonstrated a novel approach to creating robots that can axially transform their shape for medical and confined-space applications. Her follow-up study on the preliminary design and performance of a similar tendon-driven origami robot (18 citations) further validated the concept’s potential for unpredictable environments. Pusalkar has also made notable contributions to robot task planning, introducing a framework that leverages low-entropy belief states to improve decision-making under uncertainty, and has developed decision support systems for autonomous underwater grasping—addressing noisy perception and communication constraints in marine settings. Her recent work on leader-based coalition formation for extremely large-scale collectives tackles the computational challenges of coordinating vast robot teams. Pusalkar’s research consistently bridges bio-inspired design with practical autonomy, making her a rising voice in soft and field robotics.