Sachin Chitta is a research scientist at Willow Garage. He received a PhD from the Grasp Lab at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Grasp Lab prior to joining Willow Garage in 2007. He finished his B.Tech from IIT, Mumbai in 1999. He worked on the dynamics and control of modular locomotion systems as a graduate student. As a post-doc, he was a part of the Littledog project at Penn which aimed to design controllers for robotic walking over extremely rough terrain. Sachin also worked in the Modular Robotics Lab at Penn, developing interesting dynamic gaits for modular robots.

Sachin's current research interests are in motion planning, learning for manipulation and mobile manipulation. His current research goal is to make robots more capable, safer and easier to use for non-experts. He would like to close the loop between sensing and manipulation in real-world environments with a specific interest in realtime motion planning in dynamic environments. He works extensively on controllers for all parts of the robot and is particularly excited by the possibility of doing cool two arm mobile manipulation tasks. Sachin is also interested in robust and reliable grasping based on real world sensor data.