Max Bajracharya

Max Bajracharya is Vice President of Robotics at Toyota Research Institute (TRI), where he leads TRI's robotics effort to develop fundamentally new robotics capabilities to enable robots to empower, amplify, and improve the quality of life of people in an increasingly aging society. Previously at TRI, Max was a Director of Robotics, leading the Mobile Manipulation Technology team to combine in-situ and fleet learning to enable robots to perform complex mobile manipulation tasks in unstructured human environments.

Prior to joining TRI, Max was the autonomy technical team lead for a confidential robotics project at X, Alphabet's "Moonshot Factory," focusing on mobile manipulation and machine learning. He was the software technical team lead and system architect of a confidential mobile manipulation consumer robot project as part of Google Robotics, and the perception lead for Boston Dynamics' quadruped and humanoid robots, while part of Google.

From 2001-2014, Max was a Member of Technical Staff and group leader of the Computer Vision group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech. His initial focus was on developing advanced autonomous technology for the Mars rovers, which was used on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover and 2011 Mars Science Laboratory missions. He was a principal investigator, task lead, system architect, and project manager for many NASA and US Department of Defense basic. He worked on applied research tasks resulting in technology transfer to space missions and terrestrial systems. Subsequently, he led the development, integration, fielding, and deployment of advanced perception, manipulation, and mobility algorithms for autonomous robots for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), Legged Squad Support System (LS3), Autonomous Robotic Manipulation Software (ARM-S), and Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) programs, among others, as well as the Army Research Lab (ARL) Robotic Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA) and Future Combat Systems Autonomous Navigation System (FCS ANS).

Max graduated with a B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.