Expert in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Autonomous Systems
Dr. Aniket Bera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, where he directs the IDEAS Lab (Intelligent Design for Exploration and Augmented Systems). His group takes a robotics-first approach, focusing on how embodied agents perceive, plan, interact, and collaborate safely with people in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments.
Dr. Bera collaborates closely with federal partners including the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Navy-aligned programs, as well as industry leaders such as Adobe Research, Intel, Disney Research, Eli Lilly, and NVIDIA. He serves as a Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and has held leadership roles at ACM SIGGRAPH MIG and the ACM/EG Symposium on Computer Animation. He also holds an Adjunct Associate Professor appointment at the University of Maryland, College Park.
His research integrates geometric and mathematical reasoning with modern learning methods across several interconnected areas: safety-critical planning with explicit risk margins; intent-aware navigation and shared autonomy; scalable multi-agent forecasting and simulation; manipulation in cluttered and unstructured settings; digital twins for sim-to-real transfer; and learning from demonstrations augmented with foundation models to enable rapid skill acquisition across robot platforms.