Prof. Pulkit Agrawal
Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
What Robots Are Missing: Force Intelligence and Lifelong Learning
Abstract
Modern robots can plan sophisticated motions, yet they remain slow, brittle, and unreliable on tasks humans find effortless. The missing piece is not better planning, but better force reasoning: knowing when, where, and how much force to apply under uncertainty and across diverse tasks. Force intelligence, Prof. Agrawal argues, is a unifying principle for scalable robotics — bridging dexterous manipulation and whole-body control.
However, even a force-aware robot that cannot learn from its own experience will remain brittle. Today's systems are effectively frozen after training, unable to adapt once deployed. Real-world autonomy instead demands learning in deployment: the ability to improve continuously from interactions, failures, and successes.
In this talk, Prof. Agrawal will present his lab's recent work on lifelong learning and outline a future path for how combining it with force-centric design could enable reliable, useful robots in the real world.
About
Pulkit Agrawal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a bachelor's from IIT Kanpur, where he was awarded the Director's Gold Medal.
His work has received multiple Best Paper Awards, the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, the IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, the Sony, Salesforce, and Amazon Research Awards, the Signatures Fellow Award, and the Fulbright Science and Technology Award. He is a co-founder of Eka Robotics and previously co-founded SafelyYou Inc.