Aniket Bera

Research Areas

• Graphics, Visualization, and Geometric Modeling
• Robotics and Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing
• Human-Computer Interaction

Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Computer Science (2017)

Dr. Aniket Bera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. He directs the interdisciplinary IDEAS Lab — Intelligent Design for Exploration and Augmented Systems — a robotics‐first group that studies how embodied agents plan, perceive, and collaborate safely with people. The lab’s emphasis is on motion planning with guarantees, human–robot collaboration, multi‐robot coordination, and manipulation in complex, dynamic environments. Computer vision powers perception and mapping (SLAM at scale, multi‐sensor fusion, and 3D scene representations), while graphics/VR supports simulation, evaluation, and human‐in‐the‐loop studies.

His research agenda combines matherical reasoning with modern learning methods. Current threads include: planners with explicit safety margins and recovery behavior; intent‐aware navigation and shared autonomy; scalable multi‐agent forecasting and simulation; contact‐rich manipulation and mobile manipulation; digital twins for verification and sim‐to‐real transfer in regulated settings; and learning from demonstrations paired with foundation models for robots (vision‐language‐action and diffusion/trajectory policies) for rapid skill capture and retargeting across tools, fixtures, and robot form factors.

Dr. Bera works closely with federal partners across the Department of Defense (e.g., ARL and Navy‐aligned efforts), and industry, including Adobe Research, Intel, Disney Research, Eli Lilly, and others. These collaborations help turn fundamental advances into tested deployments, shared datasets, and reproducible toolchains.

He currently serves as Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA‐L) in Planning & Simulation. He has held leadership roles across the graphics/robotics communities, including Conference Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 2022) and Outreach Chair for the ACM/EG Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2023). Prior to Purdue, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also completed his Ph.D. in 2017. He holds an adjunct appointment at the University of Maryland at College Park and is the founder of Project Dost.

Awards and recognition. His work has received multiple Best Paper awards and finalist honors across robotics and graphics/VR communities, including at ICRA and IEEE VR. Dr. Bera's research has been featured on CBS, WIRED, Forbes, FastCompany, Times of India etc.

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