Michael Lanighan

Dr. Lanighan’s research focuses on developing planning techniques that enable robots to overcome situational uncertainty. By focusing on salient subsets of state information and mitigating risk, these techniques lead to robust autonomous systems capable of long-term deployments. His thesis work at UMass in hierarchical belief-space planning enabled an autonomous mobile manipulator to execute hundreds of actions while avoiding decision making failures that would have required human intervention. He joined TRACLabs in 2018 after previously participating in the development of the CRAFTSMAN software framework as a graduate intern. He has assisted in the development of CRAFTSMAN applications for NASA Robonaut 2, NASA Valkyrie, and proof-of-concept flexible manufacturing cells. He is currently representing TRACLabs on-site at NASA JSC, furthering the capabilities of the Valkyrie humanoid robot.