My name is Nikhil Chavan-Dafle. I am a PhD candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of Manipulation and Mechanisms Lab.

I am interested in dexterous robotic manipulation. I am enabling robots to reason about effectively using gravity, dynamic arm motions, and environment around them for in-hand manipulation, as we humans often do. This allows robots to pick up an object (however possible), regrasp it in hand, and then use it for the desired application. As we envision robots enabling flexible manufacturing in industrial settings or helping the society in our homes and fields such versatile and robust manipulation capability is essential.

Here are some snippets of my work from:

PhD thesis defense -

MIT School of Engineering, TechCrunch, DigitalTrends -

RSS 2018 (Won Best Student Paper award) - 

 MIT and TechCrunch homepage -