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RAM VASUDEVAN

Mechanical Engineering Department
Robotics Institute

2505 Hayward Street
3252 Ford Motor Company Robotics Building
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2133

(first name) (first letter of last name) {at} umich {dot} edu 

Biography

Ram Vasudevan is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan with an appointment in the University of Michigan's Robotics Program. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and an Honors Degree in Physics in May 2006, an MS degree in Electrical Engineering in May 2009, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in December 2012 all from the University of California, Berkeley. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoctoral associate in the Locomotion Group at MIT from 2012 till 2014 before joining the University of Michigan in 2015.  He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, and University of Michigan’s 1938E Award. His work has received best paper awards at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, the ASME Dynamics Systems and Controls Conference, IEEE RAS EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, IEEE OCEANS Conference, and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and has been finalist for best paper awards at Robotics: Science and Systems.

Research Interests

The goal of my research is to develop autonomous systems that can be safely and robustly deployed in the real-world. Building these kinds of systems requires devising efficient algorithms that can reason about complex, probabilistic models. In practice, this requires devising the right type of computational representation. To build this representation, my group relies on tools that live at the intersection of optimization, dynamical systems, and machine learning.