Maani Ghaffari

Additional Title(s)

• Assistant Professor, NA&ME
• Assistant Professor, Robotics

Maani Ghaffari received the Ph.D. degree from the Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS), University of Technology Sydney, NSW, Australia, in 2017. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and the Department of Robotics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, where he directs the Computational Autonomy and Robotics Laboratory (CURLY). His work on sparse, globally optimal kinodynamic motion planning on Lie groups received the best paper award finalist title at the 2023 Robotics: Science and Systems conference. He is the recipient of the 2021 Amazon Research Awards. His research interests lie in the theory and applications of robotics and autonomous systems.

He has expertise in developing efficient generalizable algorithms for robot autonomy operating in unstructured, dynamic, and uncertain environments. He has developed geometric state estimation, geometric control methods, geometric deep neural network architectures (LieNeuron), information-theoretic motion planning, and mapping algorithms for mobile robots.