ENGINEERS WEEK 2026 DINNER & PRESENTATION
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- 1 Ray St
- North Grafton, Massachusetts
- United States 01536
- Building: Post OfficePub
- Room Number: IEEE Room
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- Co-sponsored by ASME Worcester County Section
- Starts 23 January 2026 05:00 AM UTC
- Ends 17 February 2026 05:00 AM UTC
- Admission fee ?
Speakers
Prof. Nitin J. Sanket of Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Robot Perception: Did We Get It All Wrong?
Small birds and insects navigate complex environments using milliwatts of power, while modern robots rely on dense 3D reconstruction and GPUs—and still fail outside controlled settings. This gap is most severe for small autonomous robots, where traditional perception–
In this talk, I argue for a fundamentally different approach to autonomy inspired by biological systems operating at the extreme limits of size and energy. Rather than building explicit maps of the world, we design agents around tight sensorimotor loops that actively control their motion and physical interactions to extract only task-relevant information. This perspective leads to passive computation—a paradigm in which physics, structure, and embodiment perform the first and most efficient stage of perception before any algorithm runs to build truly intelligent embodied agents.
By exploiting optical, motion, and acoustic cues, robots can navigate reliably without dense geometry—even in complete darkness and in environments fundamentally hostile to vision, including smoke, dust, fog, and snow. I will conclude with recent advances in ultrasound-based navigation and a unifying theory of novel perception, pointing toward a shift from compute-centric autonomy to sensing-driven intelligence grounded in physics.
Biography:
Prof. Nitin J. Sanket is currently an Assistant Professor in Robotics Engineering with affiliations to Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (pronounced as Wuster). He received his M.S. in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP lab, where he worked with Prof. Kostas Daniildis on developing a benchmark for indoor to outdoor visual-inertial odometry systems. He was an Assistant Clinical Professor in the First-Year Innovation and Research Experience and a Postdoctoral fellow in the Perception and Robotics Group at the University of Maryland, College Park. During this time, he worked with Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos and Dr. Conelia Fermuller on developing Bio-inspired AI frameworks using the Action-Perception Synergy for resource-constrained tiny mobile robots. His doctoral thesis won the Larry S. Davis award and the MDPI Drones Ph.D. Thesis award. He is also a recipient of the Dean's fellowship, Future Faculty Fellowship, Ann G. Wylie fellowship and was the Maryland Robotics center student ambassador. He has also taught courses, including hands-on aerial robotics and vision, planning and control in aerial robotics. Nitin is currently an Associate Editor for the Nature npj Robotics and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Journal. He is also a reviewer for Science Robotics, Nature npj Robotics, RA-L, T-ASE, IMAVIS, CVPR, ICRA, RSS, IROS, SIGGRAPH and many other top journals and conferences. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, US Army, Samsung, Office of Naval Research, Ericsson, RTX and others.
Email:
Address:Unity Hall, 250E, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States
Agenda
6:00PM - Networking/Social Time, Welcome
6:30PM - Dinner
7:00-8:00PM - Presentation followed by Q&A