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 and its applications to industrial manufacturing and assembly automation. I am enabling robots to reason about an effective use of gravity, dynamic arm motions, and environment around them for in-hand manipulation, as we humans often do.

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 -