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About

Kaushik Shivakumar is a robotics researcher whose work focuses on autonomous manipulation of deformable objects, including cables and fabrics. His major contributions lie in developing interactive perception and uncertainty quantification methods to enable robots to untangle long, self-occluded cables—a notoriously difficult problem in robotics. His 2022 paper on autonomously untangling long cables (20 citations) and its 2023 extension, SGTM 2.0 (12 citations), introduced novel actions that reduce perception uncertainty, allowing robots to manage complex slack and reachability challenges. Shivakumar also advanced fabric manipulation through cloud-based robotics, co-authoring the first demonstration of one-arm garment folding using the Reach platform (19 citations). His work on semantic mechanical search leverages large vision-language models to reduce search time for occluded objects (4 citations). By combining interactive perception with cloud robotics, Shivakumar has enabled scalable, remote execution of complex manipulation policies, pushing the boundaries of autonomous handling of everyday deformable objects.