Annika Srinivasan

Hello everyone! My name is Annika Srinivasan. I am from northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C.! I am a rising senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, pursuing my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. My research interests include applying robotics and engineering to medicine and the healthcare industry. My previous experience involves designing and prototyping the protective covering of a robotic medical arm simulator, which aims to standardize diagnostic procedures by mimicking certain neurological behaviors for medical students to observe. Additionally, I am working on a project that employs a human-machine interface for real-time data acquisition, allowing for the computation of the centroidal dynamics model of a human pilot. The developed model will be leveraged to investigate human motion and balancing strategies to inspire robotic control and expand the range of replicable human motions by robots. This summer, I will be working at Professor Henny Admoni’s Human and Robot Partners-HARP Lab and Professor Zackory Erickson’s Robotic Caregiving and Human Interaction-RCHI Lab, where I will have the opportunity to pursue my interests further. I will collaborate with PhD student Zulekha Karachiwalla to develop a wound-care robotic system. I am grateful for the research experience I will gain at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, and I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Admoni, Dr. Erickson, Zulekha, Rachel Burcin, Dr. John Dolan, and Morgan Grimm for the opportunity. I am eager to begin my work at CMU this summer and look forward to meeting the rest of the RISS Cohort.