Ashis G. Banerjee

Associate Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Mechanical Engineering

University of Washington

Welcome

I am a tenured faculty in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), where I direct the Scale-independent Multimodal Automated Real Time Systems (SMARTS) Lab. I am affiliated with the Boeing Advanced Research Center (BARC), and serve as an Advisory Board member of the UW Amazon Science Hub. Prior to joining UW, I was a Research Scientist at GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY, and a Research Scientist and Postdoctoral Associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. I obtained both my Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, and B.Tech. in Manufacturing Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

The goal of my research program is to develop AI-based decision-making methods for cyber-physical systems to achieve unprecedented robustness and agility. Such systems include multiple, heterogeneous entities (humans, robots, digital models, physical assets, etc.), operate in dynamic and uncertain environments, and span multiple spatial and temporal scales in terms of action feasibility and execution. The methods, therefore, should be novel to address unsolved challenges, theoretically sound to provide performance guarantees, and both computationally efficient and easily realizable to be practically useful. These requirements lead to a tight coupling of mathematical and physical modeling of system behaviors or responses, model-based and data-driven entity-level perception and reasoning, and inter-entity coordination. Please visit the Projects and Publications pages for details on the specific methods and application domains.

I am also active professionally in the robotics, automation, and AI communities. Currently, I serve as a Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and as an Associate Editor for ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, Frontiers in Robotics & AI, and Springer Journal of Micro and Bio Robotics.

Please check out my LinkedIn and X (formerly, Twitter) profiles for regular work updates.

Latest News

  • Our open-access paper on topological analysis for 3D shape and color-based object Recognition in Unseen Environments has been published in the Advanced Intelligent Systems journal. Check it out for some cool work on realizing visual perception for affordable robots!
  • Ekta Samani successfully completed her Ph.D. and will start a postdoc position at CMU Robotics Institute! Congratulations, Dr. Samani, for your excellent work, which won the UW Graduate School's 2024 Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Mathematics, Physical Sciences & Engineering category.
  • Our paper on a novel adaptation of persistent homology for cluttered object recognition has been published in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO) journal! Check out the relevant story at UW News.
  • I am a Co-PI on a recently awarded $1.8M grant on machine learning enabled, radio frequency heating-based processing of aerospace composites from the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
  • I have been awarded a UW Amazon Science Hub research gift to work on decentralized mapping of cluttered indoor scenes using a team of low-cost mobile robots.
  • Our paper on probabilistic mapping-based anomaly detection in confined spaces has been published in the March 2023 issue of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) journal.