Team

Project Investigators

Principal Investigator

Souma Chowdhury

Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University at Buffalo

Research in design optimization, physics-informed machine learning, graph reinforcement learning, and multi-robot systems. Co-director of the Center for Embodied Autonomy and Robotics.

Faculty profile ↗

Co-Principal Investigator

Karthik Dantu

Associate Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo

Research in perception, environment representation, and planning for safe and efficient robot autonomy. Director of the DRONES Lab and founding director of the Center for Embodied Autonomy and Robotics.

Faculty profile ↗

Co-Principal Investigator

Ehsan Tarkesh Esfahani

Associate Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University at Buffalo

Research in human-machine interaction, human and humanoid locomotion, bio-robotics, and artificial intelligence in engineering. Director of Graduate Studies in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

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Co-Principal Investigator

Chen Wang

Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo

Research in robot perception, spatial reasoning, and decision-making in unstructured environments. Develops neuro-symbolic learning methods for robot autonomy and leads work on differentiable robotics through PyPose.

Faculty profile ↗

Student Researchers

Student Researcher

Pranay Meshram

PhD student · Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo

Research in robotics, autonomous driving, robot perception, and artificial intelligence. Coauthor of CLEAR, a terrain abstraction framework for large-scale off-road planning.

Personal website ↗

Student Researcher

Kristian Dalland

PhD candidate · HILS
University at Buffalo

Research in human performance and cognitive metric estimation for operations involving multiple humans and agents.

LinkedIn profile ↗

Student Researcher

Zhipeng Zhao

PhD student · Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo

Research in robot perception and neuro-symbolic AI. Lead author of Learning When to Jump for Off-road Navigation, presented at RSS 2026.

LinkedIn profile ↗

Student Researcher

Prithvi Poddar

Student researcher
University at Buffalo

Research in robotics, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and safety in multi-agent systems.

LinkedIn profile ↗

Investigator roles follow the GRAPPLE introduction. Student participation and University at Buffalo affiliations are confirmed by the project team. Pranay’s portrait is sourced from his personal website; the other student portraits are sourced from their LinkedIn profiles. Research details and investigator photos are sourced from university, lab, and researcher profiles.