About Us

Welcome to the Perception and Autonomous Robotics Group (PeAR)'s website. PeAR is led by Prof. Nitin J. Sanket. Our lab was founded in 2022 and our home is the Robotics Engineering Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Our mission is to tackle fundamental problems in robot perception and autonomy to enable better life. We work on pushing the boundaries of autonomy at extreme resource constrained tiny robots using only on-board computation and sensing. In-particular we work on navigation of nano-drones (and other robots) using only cameras and inertial sensors and onboard computation without the need for external infrastructure such as GPS or motion capture systems. We call our approach to autonomy as Minimal-AI due to the nature of its design and its efficiency in solving the desired tasks. We utilize concepts from Active Perception, Interactive Perception, Passive and Novel computing and Deep Compression.