Rishabh Madan

Hi! I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Prof. Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee in the EmPRISE Lab, where we build physical caregiving robots. Much of robot manipulation treats contact beyond the end-effector as something to avoid or simply constrain. My research takes a different view: I develop a touch-native paradigm for robot manipulation, where contact is treated as a first-class signal to be sensed, predicted, optimized, and personalized. Caregiving tasks make this especially demanding: they require sustained whole-arm contact with people, where safety, comfort, task success, and individual preferences must all be balanced in real time. I build distributed tactile sensing, contact-aware planning, and personalized compliant control for building robots that assist people with mobility limitations.

Previously, I interned with the Human-Robot Interaction team at Toyota Research Institute and worked as a Robotics Software Engineer at SAGA Robotics. I also spent a year as a visiting scientist at the Personal Robotics Lab under Siddhartha S. Srinivasa. I completed my B.Tech. at IIT Kharagpur, working with Pabitra Mitra on efficient exploration in RL. I contributed to motion planning and perception stack at the Autonomous Ground Vehicle (AGV) Research Group and actively promoted open-source development as a member of the Kharagpur Open Source Society.