Papers
56
Total Citations
4,186
H-Index
31
About
Sachin Chitta is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans motion planning, robotic manipulation, collision detection, and autonomous systems. He is perhaps best known as a principal architect of MoveIt!, the widely adopted open-source motion planning framework that has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for complex robotic software development, earning over 269 citations for his foundational case study on the platform. His contributions to collision detection through the FCL library (537 citations) established a versatile standard for proximity queries that remains deeply embedded in modern robotics pipelines. Chitta's research into robotic grasping is equally influential. His tactile-sensing-inspired grasp controller (410 citations) brought human-like dexterity to parallel jaw grippers, while his work on contact-reactive and household grasping demonstrated reliable manipulation under real-world uncertainty. Complementing this, his investigations into reinforcement learning for skill acquisition and finite-state representation learning from demonstrations (207 and 193 citations, respectively) push robots toward greater autonomy and adaptability. Beyond manipulation, Chitta has explored autonomous navigation and door-opening behaviors, search-based manipulation planning, and modular robot locomotion. Across more than 2,200 combined citations in his top works alone, his research has profoundly shaped both the theoretical foundations and practical software infrastructure of modern robotics.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1FCL: A general purpose library for collision and proximity queries537 citations · 2012
- 2Human-Inspired Robotic Grasp Control With Tactile Sensing410 citations · 2011
- 3Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study269 citations · 2014
- 4Skill learning and task outcome prediction for manipulation207 citations · 2011
- 5Contact-reactive grasping of objects with partial shape information201 citations · 2010
- 6Learning grounded finite-state representations from unstructured demonstrations193 citations · 2014
- 7Autonomous door opening and plugging in with a personal robot176 citations · 2010
- 8Towards Reliable Grasping and Manipulation in Household Environments166 citations · 2013
- 9Search-based planning for manipulation with motion primitives133 citations · 2010
- 10Dynamic Rolling for a Modular Loop Robot129 citations · 2009