Prof. Gaurav S. Sukhatme is Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). He holds the Fletcher Jones Foundation Endowed Chair in Computer Science and serves as the Executive Vice Dean at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He obtained his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1991, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1993 and 1997 respectively.
After a brief postdoc at USC, Prof. Sukhatme joined there as a faculty member. Presently, he is a Professor and Co-Director of the USC Robotics Research Laboratory. He is also Director of the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, which he founded in 2000. Prof. Sukhatme was the Chairman of the Computer Science department at USC from 2012-17. He is one of the founders of the Robotics: Science and Systems conference. He was program chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the 2011 IEEE/ RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems – the two largest academic conferences in the field. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Nature journal, Autonomous Robots, and has served in the past as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing.
Prof. Sukhatme’s research has focused on networked robots, learning robots and field robotics. He has published extensively in these and related areas. He has served as the Principal Investigator on numerous NSF, DARPA and NASA grants and was a Co-PI on the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center. He is recognized for formulating and solving problems in the design of networked robotic systems. His lab has produced novel work in the applications of robotic systems that plan and learn. These have found use in monitoring the natural ecosystem, particularly the aquatic environment. Recently, his research group has been active in the area of robot grasping and manipulation, using tools from estimation, learning, and motion planning.
Prof. Sukhatme is a Fellow of AAAI (2018) and a Fellow of IEEE (2010). He is a recipient of the Okawa Foundation Research Award (2006), NSF Career Award (2002), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Research Award (2000).