Maxim Likhachev

Maxim Likhachev is a Professor at the Robotics Institute and National Robotics Engineering Center, both within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, particularly in real-time graph search algorithms, planning under uncertainty, and high-dimensional mobile manipulation. He co-founded TravelWits.com and RobotWits (acquired by Waymo), and his lab develops the Search-based Planning Library (SBPL), integrated into ROS.

Research Themes:

• Graph search-based planning for deterministic and probabilistic domains
• Decomposition of hard planning problems into sequential graph searches
• Incremental algorithms for dynamic environments
• Experience-driven heuristic optimization

Scientific Awards:

• Gold Edison Award (2013) for industrial mobile manipulator project
• DARPA Urban Challenge Winner (2007) for autonomous SUV navigation

Students: Supervises current PhD students including Itamar Mishani, Muhammad Suhail Saleem, and Rishi Veerapaneni, alongside Masters students like Gabriel Olin. Past advisees include Dhruv Saxena (now at Uber), Michael Phillips (now at Uber), and Shivam Vats (now at Waymo).

Lab & Projects: Leads the Search-based Planning Laboratory at CMU, working on systems like K-MAX helicopter, PR2 robots, and industrial mobile manipulators for tasks including autonomous paint stripping and aerial navigation.