Shivam Vats

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Intelligent Robot Lab led by Prof. George Konidaris in the Department of Computer Science, Brown University. I earned my PhD from the Robotics Institute at CMU where I was co-advised by Prof. Maxim Likhachev and Prof. Oliver Kroemer. I am interested in building continually improving robots that can plan to solve complex tasks, like “assemble my coffee table”, and plan to learn new motor skills when their capabilities are insufficient, like fastening an unseen square screw. This ASME article provides a good overview of my work on robots that plan to learn.

Previously, I studied maths and computing at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur where I worked with Prof. P.P. Chakrabarti and Prof. Bibhas Adhikari on heuristic search and simplicial complexes. I was a core developer of SymPy and an active contributor to SymEngine for many years. I also regularly participated in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition as a member of the Autonomous Ground Vehicle Group.

I am looking for new collaborations and am always happy to chat about robotics and research. Do reach out if you are interested in working with me, especially if you are a student at Brown. Here are some of my ongoing projects:

• learning composable motor skills from videos
• multi-robot motion planning using diffusion models
• recovery from failures using large vision-language models
• interactive learning in human-robot teams

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn