People
People in robotics
43 people in the USASI People directory whose profiles list robotics as a field of their work. Listed alphabetically; this is not a ranking. Each profile covers public professional work only, cited to official pages.
Alexander Amini
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Liquid AI
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Liquid AI; lead organizer of MIT 6.S191 Intro to Deep Learning
Amnon Shashua
Co-founder, President and CEO, Mobileye
Co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye; Sachs Chair in Computer Science at the Hebrew University
Anca Dragan
Heads AI Safety and Alignment (on leave from UC Berkeley), Google DeepMind
Heads AI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind; UC Berkeley associate professor who runs the InterACT Lab
Anton Troynikov
Co-founder, Chroma
Co-founder of Chroma; co-author of Chroma technical reports on retrieval and context
Bob McGrew
Listed under executive leadership in the OpenAI o1 System Card (2024), OpenAI
Listed in OpenAI's executive leadership on the o1 System Card; led aspects of OpenAI's robot-hand research
Brett Adcock
Founder and CEO, Figure
Founder and CEO of Figure, which builds general-purpose humanoid robots and the Helix robot model
Byron Boots
Professor; Amazon Professor of Machine Learning; director of the UW Robot Learning Laboratory, University of Washington
Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington; co-founder and CEO of Overland AI
Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Stanford assistant professor who runs the IRIS lab; co-founder of Physical Intelligence and co-author of π0
Damion Shelton
Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, Agility Robotics
Co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Agility Robotics; its CEO from 2015 to 2024
Deepak Pathak
Co-founder and CEO, Skild AI
Co-founder and CEO of Skild AI; Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Dieter Fox
Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; head of the RSE-Lab, University of Washington
UW Allen School professor who leads Ai2's Robotics team; started NVIDIA's robotics research lab in 2017
Dmitri Dolgov
Co-Chief Executive Officer, Waymo
Co-CEO of Waymo and a founder of the Google self-driving car project; formerly Waymo's CTO
Emanuel Todorov
Research and development, Roboti LLC
Roboti LLC researcher whose lab built the MuJoCo physics engine; former UW and UC San Diego professor
Gavriel State
Senior Director for Simulation and AI, NVIDIA
Senior Director for Simulation and AI at NVIDIA, heading the team behind Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab
Jeff Cardenas
Co-founder and CEO, Apptronik
Co-founder and CEO of Apptronik, maker of the Apollo humanoid robot
Jim Fan
Senior Research Scientist and Lead of the AI Agents Initiative; co-lead of the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) group, with Yuke Zhu, NVIDIA
Co-leads NVIDIA's GEAR embodied-agents group; co-author of GR00T N1, Voyager and Eureka
Jitendra Malik
Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS, University of California, Berkeley
Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley; VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon's FAR lab
Joelle Pineau
Chief AI Officer, Cohere
Chief AI Officer at Cohere and McGill professor; led Meta's FAIR research team from 2017 to 2025
Jonathan Hurst
Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer, Agility Robotics
Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer of Agility Robotics; Oregon State University professor of robotics
Josef Sivic
Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; head of the IMPACT group, Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC), Czech Technical University
Professor at CIIRC, Czech Technical University, and head of the IMPACT group; consults for Adobe Research
Justin Fu
Research scientist, Waymo Research (since August 2021), Waymo
Research scientist at Waymo Research and lead developer of the open-source Waymax driving simulator
Ken Goldberg
William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair of Engineering; Distinguished Professor of IEOR and EECS and Art Practice, University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley Distinguished Professor working on robot grasping and automation; senior author of Dex-Net 2.0
Lex Fridman
Host, Lex Fridman Podcast
Host of the Lex Fridman Podcast, long-form conversations including AI, robotics and programming
Marc Raibert
Founder and Executive Director, Robotics and AI Institute
Founder of Boston Dynamics and executive director of the Robotics and AI Institute
Mathias Lechner
Co-founder and CTO, Liquid AI
Co-founder and CTO of Liquid AI; first author of the Neural Circuit Policies paper
Mido Assran
Scientist and Member of Technical Staff, founding team, Advanced Machine Intelligence
Scientist at Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI); first author of V-JEPA 2 and I-JEPA from Meta FAIR
Ming-Yu Liu
Vice President of Cosmos Lab (Vice President of Research), NVIDIA
Vice President of Cosmos Lab at NVIDIA; supervised the Cosmos3 world model family
Misha Denil
Research Scientist (10 years), Google DeepMind
Former Google DeepMind research scientist whose work includes data-driven robotics and learned optimizers
Nicholas Paine
Co-founder and CTO, Apptronik
Co-founder and CTO of Apptronik; worked on actuators for NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot
Peggy Johnson
Chief Executive Officer (since March 2024), Agility Robotics
CEO of Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit humanoid robot; former CEO of Magic Leap
Pieter Abbeel
Professor, Jim Gray Chair of Engineering; Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab; Co-Director of BAIR, University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley professor and Robot Learning Lab director; Amazon Scholar; former OpenAI research scientist
Pras Velagapudi
Chief Technology Officer (joined May 2023), Agility Robotics
Chief Technology Officer of Agility Robotics, leading the Digit humanoid robot's technology roadmap
Ramin Hasani
Co-founder and CEO, Liquid AI
Co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI; first author of the Liquid Time-constant Networks paper
Rev Lebaredian
Vice president of physical AI simulation, NVIDIA
NVIDIA vice president of physical AI simulation, heading the Omniverse product, engineering and research teams
Rohit Prasad
Chief Executive Officer, Boston Dynamics
CEO of Boston Dynamics since October 2026; previously head scientist for Alexa and AGI at Amazon
Satish Jeyachandran
Vice President, Engineering, Waymo
Vice President of Engineering at Waymo, heading the hardware organization for the Waymo Driver
Sergey Levine
Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley associate professor working on robot learning; co-author of the π0 robot foundation model paper
Simon Suo
Co-founder, LlamaIndex
Co-founder of LlamaIndex; former research scientist at Uber ATG working on self-driving
Tekedra Mawakana
Co-Chief Executive Officer, Waymo
Co-CEO of Waymo since April 2021, responsible for company strategy; previously Waymo's COO
Tuomas Haarnoja
Research Scientist, DeepMind
First author of Soft Actor-Critic and a bipedal robot soccer paper; joined DeepMind after a Berkeley PhD
Vikash Kumar
Co-founder, CEO, Myolab.ai
Co-founder and CEO of Myolab.ai and CMU adjunct professor; lead creator of MyoSuite and RoboHive
Yann LeCun
Executive Chairman, Advanced Machine Intelligence
Executive Chairman of AMI Labs and NYU professor; former Chief AI Scientist at Meta and co-author of V-JEPA 2
Support Us
Help keep USASI useful.
Optional. No USASI account required. Payment takes place on the linked provider’s website (Buy Me a Coffee).
About supporting this project