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Sanjiban Choudhury bags Navy Young Investigator Award
Choudhury won the award for advancing AI-driven robots to perform complex, multistep tasks autonomously.
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Sanjiban Choudhury / Image - Sajibanc
Sanjiban Choudhury, an Indian-origin assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, has been honored with the Young Investigator Program award from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR).
The $750,000 grant, awarded over three years, recognizes Choudhury’s groundbreaking work in robotics and artificial intelligence.Leading the People and Robot Teaching and Learning (PoRTaL) group at Cornell’s Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Choudhury’s research focuses on enabling robots to perform complex, multistep tasks such as repairing ship engines.
The innovation lies in teaching robots to interpret information from manuals, human instructional videos, and real-time feedback to independently execute these tasks.
Choudhury’s project addresses a crucial challenge: how robots can translate human actions and language into executable movements despite differences in capabilities, such as robots’ limited range of motion. By bridging AI technologies like large language models with robotics, his team aims to create robots capable of working in hazardous environments or assisting with everyday repairs at home.
The ONR award supports 24 early-career STEM researchers selected from over 230 applicants. Choudhury’s work aligns with the Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems program, a Navy initiative to develop intelligent robots that can act as effective human teammates.
The funding will support two graduate students and equip the PoRTaL lab with advanced robotic tools. Choudhury’s team will build on their success in translating human actions into robot tasks, with all results shared as open-source resources.
“It’s a pretty big shift from what robots can do today,” Choudhury said, noting that his group has had some success with translating human videos to robot tasks in preliminary work, and he looks forward to building on that foundation.
“I’m excited about taking a completely new task and just handing that to the system and seeing what it can do,” he said. “I don’t think any research group has pushed the limits of how general-purpose robots can be.”
Choudhury holds a Btech and Mtech degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Karaghpur, an MS and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.
Lab members and robots in Sanjiban Choudhury’s group. Top row, left to right: Edward Duan ’26, Saksham Diwan ’26, Atiksh Bhardwaj ’26, Will Huey ’25 and master’s student Prithwish Dan ’24. Bottom row, left to right: doctoral students Yuki Wang, Gonzalo Gonzalez, Yujin Kim, Yunhai Feng and Kushal Kedia. / Image - Cornell
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