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 constrain. I take a different view: I build touch-native manipulation systems for physical human-robot interaction that treat contact as a first-class signal. These systems reason across contact scales, from the end-effector to distributed whole-body contact, and across interaction horizons, from regulating forces in real time to planning contact-rich tasks to adapting to a person's contact preferences over repeated interactions. Caregiving makes this especially demanding: sustained whole-arm contact with people means safety, comfort, task success, and individual preferences must be balanced at once. Toward this, I develop distributed tactile sensing, contact-aware planning, and personalized compliant control for 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 the 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.