Anand Bhattad, an Indian American assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, has been awarded the Best Paper Award on Robot Learning at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
The prestigious recognition showcases a breakthrough in how machines physically perceive their surroundings. Typically, artificial intelligence models guiding automated machinery are trained from a fixed viewpoint, causing them to fail or miscalculate movements if the deployment camera moves or is repositioned.
Bhattad’s collaborative research addresses this widespread limitation by explicitly conditioning robot policies on camera position and orientation.
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The study, titled “Do You Know Where Your Camera Is? View-Invariant Policy Learning with Camera Conditioning,” was formulated alongside a team of researchers from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC).
To evaluate viewpoint robustness, the engineering team introduced six new robotic manipulation tasks, releasing them alongside code and demonstrations to prove that robots could successfully execute assignments under shifting physical vantage points.
Bhattad’s journey into advanced academic research began in India, where he completed his undergraduate studies. He earned his Bachelor of Technology in Civil Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) Surathkal.
He moved to the United States for advanced studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he expanded his academic focus by earning a dual master’s degree in Computer Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering. He subsequently completed his PhD in Computer Science at the same institution.
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Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where he is a member of the Department of Computer Science and the Data Science and AI Institute, Bhattad served as a research assistant professor at TTIC.
He also spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. His ongoing research focuses on computer vision, robotics, and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of pixels, perception, and physics through his 3P Vision Group.
The annual ICRA conference is widely recognized as a premier international forum for robotics researchers and industry experts to debut cutting-edge algorithmic and hardware breakthroughs. This year’s award reinforces the vital role that international scholar pipelines play in driving American technological innovation.