Dr. Balasubramanian received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from the national University of Singapore in 2000. He then received a Ph.D. degree in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon in 2006. He previously served as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington Neurobotics lab and an associate research scientist at Yale University. Since 2011, He has served as an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University (OSU). He is the head of the Robotics and Human Control Systems Lab here at OSU.
Dr. Balasubramanian specializes in robotics and human control systems and has two primary research goals: (1) to make robots operate robustly in unstructured environments such as the outdoors and built environments not specifically designed to accommodate robotic operations; and (2) to develop a deeper understanding of the neural control and biomechanics in the human body. His approach involves a tight integration of fundamental control and design techniques as well as human-subject experiments to study human performance. Application areas include robotic grasping and manipulation, mobile robotics, human-robot interaction, and rehabilitation.