Aaron Parness

Aaron Parness received his PhD from Stanford in 2009 advised by Mark Cutkosky. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering and BS in Creative Writing from MIT in 2004. He currently works as a Director of Applied Science in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Amazon. His teams in Seattle and Berlin build robotic workcells to increase the speed of delivery and reduce the cost of order fulfillment for Amazon customers. Specializing in high contact and high clutter applications, he has led advances in giving robots a sense of touch by incorporating force and torque sensors into the robots’ motion plans and control loops. His work in AI and ML for robotics not only enables robots to understand their environment, but to intelligently reason over that environment and predict the outcomes of different actions the robot could take. From 2010 to 2019, Aaron worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he founded and led the Robotic Rapid Prototyping Laboratory specializing in grippers and wall climbing robots. He has received Popular Science’s ‘Best of What’s New’ award (2012), the National Academy of Engineering’s Gilbreth Lecture Award (2020), and multiple best paper awards. His Google Scholar has over 3500 citations with an h-index of 27: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xqZfI9QAAAAJ&hl=en