Blake Carpenter

Papers

Total Citations

141

H-Index

About

Blake Carpenter is a roboticist whose work centers on autonomous manipulation and mobile robot navigation in unstructured human environments. His research addresses the critical gap between controlled lab settings and the real-world challenges robots face when interacting with everyday infrastructure and objects. Carpenter’s most influential contribution is a novel grasp selection algorithm for two-fingered end-effectors, which enables robots to autonomously grasp unknown objects using only a single frame of raw depth data—without requiring explicit object models. This work, published in 2011, has garnered 92 citations and laid foundational groundwork for data-driven, model-free robotic grasping. In a complementary vein, his 2010 paper on autonomous elevator operation (49 citations) tackled the practical yet underexplored problem of enabling robots to navigate multi-floor buildings by operating unfamiliar elevator panels. This achievement demonstrated robust visual perception and interaction with dynamic, human-designed fixtures. Carpenter’s research is notable for its focus on closing the loop between perception and action, allowing robots to function independently in spaces built for people. His contributions remain highly relevant to the development of service robots, autonomous checkout systems, and mobile manipulators operating in the wild.