Ahalya Prabhakar

I am a Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist at Yale University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.  My work focuses on developing learning and control algorithms for efficient human-robot interaction. Prior to Yale, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Learning Algorithms and Systems (LASA) lab at EPFL under Prof. Aude Billard, where I worked on developing algorithms for multimodal sensory learning for safe manipulation and adaptive safety controllers for human-robot collaboration. I obtained my Ph.D. in Robotics at Northwestern University in Prof. Todd Murphey's lab. My Ph.D. work centered on developing information communication algorithms to enable intuitive human-robot collaboration and efficient robot learning using distribution-based motion representations and information-theoretic measures. I led Northwestern's team for the DARPA OFFSET Urban Swarm Challenge, developing autonomous swarm algorithms for shared human-swarm collaboration and exploring their efficacy in aiding task performance under dynamic, time-sensitive constraints.

Personal Website: https://apr600.github.io/