Ananya Rao

I'm a Postdoctal Scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and the Cedars-Sinai Center for Autonomous Robotic Surgery, working with Dr. Michael Yip. I am interested in designing and deploying heterogeneous multi-agent teams. My research is primarily focused on motion planning, coordination of multi-agent systems, and autonomous exploration. I'm particularly excited about space exploration, surgical robotics, and disaster response applications.

I received my PhD in Robotics in 2026 from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Dr. David Wettergreen and Dr. Howie Choset, and a B.S. in Computer Science, and an M.S. in Robotics, also from Carnegie Mellon. I am a recipient of the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS21).

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Selected Publications

Measure-Based Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Team Selection for Information Gathering in Disaster Response

Optimizing Start Locations in Ergodic Search for Disaster Response

Learning Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Allocations for Ergodic Search

Multi-Objective Ergodic Search for Dynamic Information Maps

Teaching

16-311: Introduction to Robotics

Co-Instructor (S24), Head Teaching Assistant (S22, S23), Teaching Assistant (S20, S21)

A hands-on labs driven course that provides a overview of robotics in practice and research with topics including vision, motion planning, mobile mechanisms, kinematics, inverse kinematics, and sensors.

XX-XXX: Computer Vision

Teaching Assistant ()

16-384: Robot Kinematics and Dynamics

Teaching Assistant (F21)

This course focuses on the kinematics, dynamics and programming of robotic mechanisms, with hands-on assignments and a capstone project.

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