Ekta Samani

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Chris Atkeson.

My research focuses on automating expertise for physical tasks in manufacturing and robotics. I study how expertise should be incorporated into autonomous systems, whether encoded in their design or drawn from general-purpose AI models. My current work builds decision-making systems for physical AI that remain useful when these models are wrong. My goal is to enable these systems to handle new situations, tasks, and errors without human intervention.

Earlier, I was a Postdoctoral Scientist at Amazon Robotics. I earned my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington (UW), advised by Prof. Ashis Banerjee. Before joining the Ph.D. program, I was an Operations Officer at Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd. in Mangalore, India. I obtained my B.Tech in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar.

Awards and Recognitions

I received the Outstanding Associate Editor Award for IEEE RA-L (2026).
I have been selected as a Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering (2025).
I won the UW Graduate School's Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Mathematics, Physical Sciences & Engineering category (2024).
I received Women Engineers (WE) Rise Outstanding Mechanical Engineering Student Award (2023).
I have been recognized as a Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneer (2023).
I won the second-place prize in the UW Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition (2023).

News

Oct 2026: Our work on LLM-guided 3D Print Configuration Selection was featured in The Physical AI Voices.
Sep 2026: Started serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE ICRA 2027.
Sep 2026: Gave an invited Talking Robotics talk on "Making Unreliable AI Useful". Link coming soon!
Sep 2025: Started serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE ICRA 2026.
Aug 2025: Organized a workshop, "Embodied AI for Robot-Powered Manufacturing Systems", at IEEE CASE 2025.
Jun 2025: Organized a workshop, "R3: Reasoning for Robust Robot Manipulation in the Open World", at RSS 2025
May 2025: Gave a spotlight talk at the IEEE ICRA 2025 workshop on Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots
Jan 2024: I started serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Jul 2023: UW Mechanical Engineering featured a story about my research on the department website. Another related story here.

Recent Work

Programming Manufacturing Robots with Imperfect AI: LLMs as Tuning Experts for FDM Print Configuration Selection

Get in touch at esamani@andrew.cmu.edu

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse