Karishma Patnaik

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan-Dearborn

Intelligent Contact-aware Robotics for Adaptive Physical Interaction

My research focuses on intelligent robotic systems for applications in manufacturing, inspection, surveillance, repair, and autonomous interaction in complex environments. I work across robotic manipulation, aerial robotics, flexible manufacturing, and human-robot collaboration, developing methods that combine control theory, sensing, and decision-making. My research uses data science and computational tools including reinforcement learning, optimization, computer vision, multimodal sensor fusion, digital twins, and large vision/language models to analyze robotic data and enable adaptive autonomy. I develop both simulation and experimental robotic systems to study problems such as contact-rich manipulation, autonomous inspection, environment-aware navigation, damage assessment, and task planning under uncertainty. A major goal of my work is to create robotic systems that can operate reliably and intelligently in real-world environments while adapting to changing physical conditions and incomplete information.

Contact-rich robotic inspection and manipulation using aerial and articulated robotic systems in unstructured industrial environments.