Akhil Padmanabha

I am currently a Research Scientist with the Motion Sensors team at Meta Reality Labs in Sunnyvale, CA. I work at the intersection of sensing and machine learning for enabling contextual AI use cases on smartglasses. I recently graduated with a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

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My work in sensing, machine learning, and assistive robotics was inspired by my own health challenges, which sparked an interest in creating human-centered technology that improves lives. In high school, I went through several severe health issues and hospitalizations, which led to homeschooling without access to honors or AP courses. Despite this, I was admitted to UC Berkeley for Psychology with the aim of becoming a licensed therapist for chronically ill adolescents before determining I wanted to focus on designing robots for social good.

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. During this time, I had the privilege of working with Professor Sergey Levine at the Robotic AI & Learning Lab, Professor Alice Agogino at BEST Lab, and Professor Wenzhen Yuan at the RoboTouch Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to research, I interned at SpaceX, where I deployed robot dogs for the Starship Launch Operations Team in Boca Chica, Texas in 2020, and upgraded the automation and controls systems codebase for the Of Course I Still Love You droneship in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2021. I also interned at robotics startup ViaBot in 2018, where I did mechatronics design and prototyping.

I completed my Ph.D. at the Robotics Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, co-advised by Professor Zackory Erickson and Professor Carmel Majidi and supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My work addressed gaps in chronic condition management by advancing portable, multimodal sensing for continuous health monitoring and personalized care. Contributions from my projects include wearable sensors and ML for scratch tracking, tactile probes and algorithms for skin surface reconstruction, and wearable and LLM-based control interfaces for physically assistive caregiving robots in the home. During my PhD, I also interned with the Motion Sensors team at Meta Reality Labs working on resource-efficient activity recognition using smartglasses.

You can view my Ph.D. defense talk, Advancing Multimodal Sensing and Robotic Interfaces for Chronic Care, here and access my publications below or on Google Scholar.

Adapted from template here