Sebastian Scherer
Associate Research Professor Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh PA
Sebastian Scherer builds robots that fly and drive through unknown environments. His work spans perception, planning, and safe embodied AI.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
CMU Researchers Develop AI System to Help Prevent Airport Collisions
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute online
2026-05-08
“Beyond aviation, World2Rules could also be used in other areas where safety is critical,” said Sebastian Scherer, an associate research professor in the RI and head of the AirLab. “The system can be adapted to different environments by teaching it the relevant rules and behaviors for that domain. Once that information is defined, the same core technology can learn and monitor safety risks without needing to be redesigned.”
Keeping Robots Moving in Extreme Environments
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute online
2026-03-05
The research team, advised by RI faculty members Sebastian Scherer and Wenshan Wang, took inspiration from how humans react in low-vision environments. In dense fog or complete darkness, people rely more heavily on internal cues like balance and motion signals from the body to keep track of their position and decide where to move next. The researchers applied a similar idea to robotics by strengthening a robot’s “internal” sense of motion.
Team Chiron Advances to Final Phase of DARPA Triage Challenge
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute online
2025-11-11
Team Chiron, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, will compete in the third and final phase of the DARPA Triage Challenge (DTC) next November.
New Model Helps Robots See in 3D
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute online
2025-10-16
Researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute (RI) and Meta Reality Labs have built a powerful model that reconstructs images, camera data or depth scans into accurate 3D maps within a unified system.
Media
Social
Education
Carnegie Mellon University, The Robotics Institute
Ph.D.
Robotics
2010
Carnegie Mellon University, The Robotics Institute
M.S.
Robotics
2007
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S.
Computer Science
2004
Patents
Vehicle operator workload estimation system and method
12504820
2025-12-23
An estimation system includes a plurality of sensors that generate a multimodal signal, where the multimodal signal indicates a state of a user. The estimation system also includes at least one processor that receives the multimodal signal from the plurality of sensors, and determines a workload experienced by the user based on the multimodal signal and a workload model, wherein the workload model relates multimodal signal data to an experienced workload.
Articles
Resilient odometry via hierarchical adaptation
Science RoboticsShibo Zhao, Sifan Zhou, Yuchen Zhang, Ji Zhang, Chen Wang, Wenshan Wang, Sebastian Scherer
2025-12-10
Resilient and robust odometry is crucial for autonomous systems operating in complex and dynamic environments. Existing odometry systems often struggle with severe sensory degradations and extreme conditions such as smoke, sandstorms, snow, or low-light conditions, threatening both the safety and functionality of robots. To address these challenges, we present Super Odometry, a sensor fusion framework that dynamically adapts to varying levels of environmental degradation.
AnyThermal: Towards Learning Universal Representations for Thermal Perception
arxivParv Maheshwari, Jay Karhade, Yogesh Chawla, Isaiah Adu, Florian Heisen, Andrew Porco, Andrew Jong, Yifei Liu, Santosh Pitla, Sebastian Scherer, Wenshan Wang
2026-02-05
We present AnyThermal, a thermal backbone that captures robust task-agnostic thermal features suitable for a variety of tasks such as cross-modal place recognition, thermal segmentation, and monocular depth estimation using thermal images. Existing thermal backbones that follow task-specific training from small-scale data result in utility limited to a specific environment and task.
