Rajat Kumar Jenamani

Rajat Kumar Jenamani
rj277 [at] cornell [dot] edu

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, where I work with Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee on building caregiving robots that can assist individuals with activities of daily living.

Before Cornell, I recieved my bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur. During my time there, I worked with Prof. P. P. Chakrabarti on multi-agent pathfinding, graduated second in my department, and received the Best Thesis Award.

Over the summers, I have had the pleasure of working with Prof. Dorsa Sadigh at Stanford University, Prof. Maxim Likhachev at Carnegie Mellon University, with Microsoft India, and with Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa at University of Washington.

cv | google scholar | github

News

[Dec 2024]
Got selected for the HRI Pioneers Workshop at HRI 2025.
[Dec 2024]
Passed my A-exam (thesis proposal)! Officially a PhD candidate now. 🤓
[Nov 2024]
Organizing a physical caregiving robots workshop at HRI 2025.
[May 2024]
FLAIR got accepted to RSS 2024.
[Mar 2024]
Our robot-assited feeding system won the Best Demo at HRI 2024!
[Feb 2024]
Feel the Bite got nominated for Best Paper at HRI 2024!

Research

Kiri-Spoon: A Kirigami Utensil for Robot-Assisted Feeding
M. Keely, B. Franco, C. Grothoff, R. K. Jenamani, T. Bhattacharjee, D. P. Losey, H. Nemlekar
In Submission, The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2025

Towards Deployable Physical Caregiving Robots: A Case Study in Mealtime Assistance
R. K. Jenamani
PhD Thesis Proposal
HRI Pioneers Workshop, 2025

To Ask or Not To Ask: Robot-assisted Bite Acquisition with Human-in-the-loop Contextual Bandits
R. Banerjee, R. K. Jenamani*, S. Vasudev*, A. Nanavati, S. Dean†, T. Bhattacharjee†
In Submission, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

FLAIR: Feeding via Long-Horizon AcquIsition of Realistic dishes
R. K. Jenamani*, P. Sundaresan*, M. Sakr, T. Bhattacharjee†, D. Sadigh†
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024

An Adaptable, Safe, and Portable Robot-Assisted Feeding System
E. K. Gordon*, R. K. Jenamani*, A. Nanavati*, et al.
Companion of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2024

Best Demo Award

Feel the Bite: Robot-Assisted Inside-Mouth Bite Transfer using Robust Mouth Perception and Physical Interaction-Aware Control
R. K. Jenamani, D. Stabile, Z. Liu, A. Anwar, K. Dimitropoulou, T. Bhattacharjee
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2024

Best Paper Award Honorable Mention

SPARCS: Structuring Physically Assistive Robotics for Caregiving with Stakeholders-in-the-loop
R. Madan*, R. K. Jenamani*, V. T. Nguyen, A. Moustafa, X. Hu, K. Dimitropoulou, T. Bhattacharjee
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022
American Occupational Therapy Association - INSPIRE, 2025

RCareWorld: A Human-centric Simulation World for Caregiving Robots
R. Ye*, W. Xu*, H. Fu, R. K. Jenamani, V. Nguyen, C. Lu, K. Dimitropoulou and T. Bhattacharjee
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022

Best Robocup Paper Award Winner, Finalist for Best Paper Award / Best Student Paper Award

Optimal Multi Agent Pathfinding for Non-Unit Edge Cost Domains and Precedence Constrained Tasks
R. K. Jenamani
B.Tech. Thesis - Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, 2021

Best Thesis Award

Press

Robotic system feeds people with severe mobility limitations
Cornell Chronicle, May 8, 2024

Caregiving simulator advances research in assistive robotics
Cornell Chronicle, November 29, 2022

Novice roboticists find inspiration, community at SoNIC
Cornell Chronicle, 25 July 2022

Caregiving Robots at Cornell
IEEE Spectrum Video Friday, 14 January 2022

A Team Is Developing Robotic Arms to Feed People With Spinal Injuries
Interesting Engineering, 11 January 2022

Robot-assisted feeding the focus of $1.5M NSF grant
Cornell Chronicle, 10 January 2022

website adapted from here