Laura Herlant, PhD

Laura Herlant is a Research Scientist at The Boston Dynamics AI Institute, whose mission is to solve the most important and fundamental challenges in AI and robotics to enable future generations of intelligent machines and help us all live better lives.

Laura’s research focuses on embodying artificial intelligence into mechanical platforms to create robots that can cope with the uncertainty of the world and interact meaningfully with humans.

Previously she worked at iRobot, leading a team of researchers and engineers to bring deep reinforcement learning algorithms and more intelligent behaviors to millions of Roomba robots.

With her Google Hertz Foundation and NSF Fellowships, Laura completed her PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in the Personal Robotics Lab. In her doctoral work, she developed algorithms to enable a wheelchair-mounted robot arm to autonomously assist people with upper-limb disabilities to feed themselves.

Prior to studying at CMU, Laura obtained a B.S. in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, and completed master’s courses in robotics and independent research at ENSTA ParisTech.