Alap Kshirsagar

Research Interests
Human-Robot Interaction, Robotic Manipulation, Tactile Perception, Robot Learning, Dynamic Motor-Skill Learning
Affiliations
TU Darmstadt, Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Computer Science Department
Contact
alap.kshirsagar@tu-darmstadt.de
Room E326, Building S2|02, TU Darmstadt, FB-Informatik, FG-IAS, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt
+49-6151-16-25380
Alap Kshirsagar joined the Intelligent Autonomous Systems lab at TU Darmstadt in July 2022 as a postdoctoral researcher. Alap's research interests include Human-Robot Interaction, Robotic Manipulation, and Tactile Perception. Alap is currently part of the Adaptive Mind research cluster that brings together scientists from Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Artificial Intelligence in order to understand how the human mind successfully adapts to changing conditions, and what happens when these adaptive processes fail.
Alap received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the Cornell University, USA in 2022. His thesis was titled "Robot Controllers, Gaze Behaviors and Human Motion Datasets for Object Handovers", and was supervised by Prof. Guy Hoffman. Before his Ph.D., Alap completed a Master's in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Bombay. He was a visiting student researcher at the University of California-Berkeley in 2016, Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen in 2017 and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2020.
Key References
-
- Hoffman, G.; Kshirsagar, A.; Law, M. V. (2022). Human-Robot Interaction Challenges in the Workplace, in: Matz, S. C. (eds.), The Psychology of Technology: Social Science Research in the Age of Big Data, APA.
-
- Kshirsagar, A.; *Hoffman, G.; *Biess, A. (2021). Evaluating Guided Policy Search for Human-Robot Handovers, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE.
-
- Kshirsagar, A.; Lim, M.; Christian, S.; Hoffman, G. (2020). Robot Gaze Behaviors in Human-to-Robot Handovers, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE.
-
- Kshirsagar, A.; Kress-Gazit, H.; Hoffman, G. (2019). Specifying and Synthesizing Human-Robot Handovers, Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE.
-
- Kshirsagar, A.; Dreyfuss, B.; Ishai, G.; Heffetz, O.; Hoffman G. (2019). Monetary-Incentive Competition between Humans and Robots: Experimental Results, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), IEEE.
A complete list of my publications is available on my personal webpage.
Supervised Theses and Projects
Year | Type | Together with | Student(s) | Topic |
---|---|---|---|---|
2024 | Master Thesis | Oliver Hahn | Yasemin Göksu | Robotic Pouring with Self-supervised Learning from Video Demonstrations |
2024 | Master Thesis | Boris Belousov | Felix Nonnengießer | Visuotactile In-Hand Pose Estimation |
2024 | Integrated Project : 1 | Kai Ploeger | Marcus Kornmann, Qimeng He | Learning to accurately throw Paper Planes using Reinforcement Learning |
2024 | Integrated Project : 2 | Vignesh Prasad | Fabian Hahne | Language Conditioned Grasp Planning for Robot-to-Human Handovers |
2024 | Bachelor Thesis | Boris Belousov, Tim Schneider, Guillaume Duret | Duc Huy Nguyen | Simulation of GelSight Tactile Sensors for Reinforcement Learning |
2024 | Bachelor Thesis | Tim Schneider, Guillaume Duret | Frederik Heller | Learning Object Stress and Deformation With Graph Neural Networks |
2023 | Integrated Project : 1 | Vignesh Prasad | Fabian Hahne | Object Perception For Human-to-Robot Handovers |
2023 | Bachelor Thesis | Boris Belousov, Tim Schneider | Dominik Horstkötter | InsertionNet for Autonomous Assembly of Self-Interlocking Blocks |
2023 | Integrated Project : 2 | Boris Belousov, Tim Schneider | Duc Huy Nguyen | TacEx: A Library for Simulating Tactile Sensors in Isaac Orbit |
2023 | Integrated Project : 2 | Vignesh Prasad | Yasemin Göksu, Antonio De Almeida Correia | Kinematically Constrained Humanlike Bimanual Robot Handovers |
2022 | Master Thesis | Dorothea Koert | Li Liu | Robot Gaze for Communicating Collision Avoidance Intent in Shared Workspaces |
2022 | Bachelor Thesis | Tim Schneider, Boris Belousov | Alina Boehm | Active Exploration for Tactile Texture Perception |
2022 | Integrated Project : 1 | Tim Schneider, Boris Belousov | Irina Rath, Dominik Horstkötter | Shape Exploration and Classification using Tactile Sensing |
2022 | Integrated Project : 1 | Julen Urain De Jesus | Hanjo Schnellbächer, Christoph Dickmanns | SE(3) Diffusion Fields Enabled Bi-Manual Grasps |
2022 | Integrated Project : 1 | Boris Belousov, Tim Schneider | Duc Huy Nguyen, Ruben Spari | Simulation of Vision-based Tactile Sensors |
2022 | Integrated Project : 1 | Firas Al-Hafez | Zeyuan Sun | Characterizing Fear-induced Adaptation of Balance by Inverse Reinforcement Learning |
2022 | Integrated Project : 1 | Boris Belousov, Tim Schneider | Mario Gomez, Frederik Heller | Object Hardness Classification and Similarity Detection Using a Vision-Based Tactile Sensor |
2022 | Integrated Project : 1 | Vignesh Prasad | Yasemin Göksu, Antonio De Almeida Correia | Kinematically Constrained Humanlike Bimanual Robot Handovers |