Nikhil Das
Papers
8
Total Citations
328
H-Index
6
About
Nikhil Das is a leading researcher at the intersection of robotics, autonomous systems, and surgical technology, with a career defined by pioneering work in collision detection, human-robot interaction, and medical robotics. His most influential contributions include the development of Fastron, a learning-based proxy collision detection algorithm that dramatically accelerates motion planning by replacing computationally expensive geometric checks with efficient machine learning models. This work, detailed in his 2020 paper (13 citations), has been extended through DiffCo (2022, 35 citations), an autodifferentiable framework for safety-aware trajectory optimization, and a scalable configuration space decomposition method (2022, 17 citations). In the surgical domain, Das has made critical advances in robotic autonomy for surgery (2018, 105 citations) and compensatory motion scaling for time-delayed procedures (2020, 45 citations), directly addressing challenges in teleoperated and autonomous surgical systems. His early work on driver hand detection (2015, 107 citations) established a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework that has influenced human-machine interaction studies. With over 320 total citations, Das’s research—spanning collision checking, autonomous navigation, and optimal manipulator placement—continues to shape the future of safe, efficient robotic systems in both industrial and clinical settings.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2ROBOT AUTONOMY FOR SURGERY105 citations · 2018
- 3Compensatory motion scaling for time-delayed robotic surgery45 citations · 2020
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