Sisir Karumanchi
Vassar College, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Papers
17
Total Citations
371
H-Index
8
About
Sisir Karumanchi is a robotics researcher whose work spans mobile manipulation, autonomous systems, and space robotics — fields where his contributions have shaped both competitive robotics and real-world deployment. He is perhaps best known for his pivotal role in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where his foundational work on affordance-based perception and whole-body planning (140 citations) helped define how dexterous robots execute complex tasks under constrained communications. His continued contributions to Team RoboSimian's 5th-place finish at the 2015 DRC Finals (86 citations) demonstrated his ability to translate algorithmic advances into competitive, hardware-integrated systems. Beyond terrestrial robotics, Karumanchi has extended his expertise to space exploration, developing payload-centric autonomy frameworks for in-space robotic assembly of large modular structures and pioneering wheel-on-limb rover designs for traversing Europa-analogue terrain — work with direct implications for future ocean world missions. His supervised autonomy framework, SURROGATE, and the Intelligent Robotics System Architecture further illustrate his commitment to human-robot teaming in unstructured environments. Across more than a decade of research, Karumanchi has consistently bridged theoretical robotics with operational systems that perform under real-world constraints.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1An Architecture for Online Affordance‐based Perception and Whole‐body Planning140 citations · 2014
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- 5A summary of team MIT's approach to the virtual robotics challenge19 citations · 2014
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- 8Modeling and traversal of pliable materials for tracked robot navigation8 citations · 2018
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- 10Toward fieldable human-scale mobile manipulation using RoMan6 citations · 2020