Jeannette Bohg

I want robots to be able to step out of the lab and become truly useful in the real world—helping in our homes, hospitals, warehouses, and beyond. To get there, we need to understand the principles behind robust sensorimotor coordination in humans and figure out how to build them into machines. That quest is what drives my research. Today, I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Stanford AI Lab and director of the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab, where my team works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision. Before coming to Stanford, I led a research group in the Autonomous Motion Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems—home to my favorite robot, Apollo. My path into robotics started with a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technical University of Dresden (think of it as today’s coterm) and an M.Sc. in Art and Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg—an incredibly fun and creatively inspiring detour. I then completed my Ph.D. in the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning at KTH in Stockholm, where I developed new methods for multi-modal scene understanding in robotic grasping. We still have a long way to go before robots can match the adaptability and skill of human hands—but every experiment brings us closer. And in my lab, we’ll keep searching until the day our robots can take on the messy, unpredictable, wonderfully complicated world outside.