I build robots that see, decide, and act — transforming multimodal sensing into precise autonomous action.
Postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University working with Axel Krieger on autonomous surgical robots for precision surgery. I received my PhD degree from Duke University, working with Patrick Codd and Boyuan Chen, across multimodal perception, surgical autonomy, and machine learning. My systems close the loop from raw sensory data to real-world intervention.
Ravi Prakash
Postdoctoral Fellow · Mechanical Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
On the faculty & research scientist job market
Selected systems
Systems I designed, built and tested end to end. All research →
2nd Workshop on the Evolving Landscape of Surgical Robotics
Surgical Autonomy for Today and Tomorrow. I co-organize ELSR with Shan Lin, Jingpei Lu, Art Jiang, Qi Dou and Ken Goldberg. Speakers and panelists: Axel Krieger, Ken Goldberg, Lueder Alexander-Kahrs, Hongliang Ren, Michael Yip, Allison Okamura, Mathias Unberath, Sabino Zani, Alan Kuntz, Ji Woong Kim, Ethan Quist and Pink McDowall.
1 October 2026IROS 2026Pittsburgh
Interested in working on fun & challenging robotic and sensing problems?
Please email me if you are interested.
News
2026
Featured in Duke Bass Connections, reflecting on interdisciplinary research, teaching, and mentorship.
SonicFly in the news: IEEE Spectrum, India Today, and more coverage.
Invited talk: Sensing–Driven Surgical Autonomy, Arizona State University Medical Robotics Course.
Joined Johns Hopkins University as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Axel Krieger, following completion of my Ph.D. at Duke.
SonicFly: our work on passive aeroacoustic perception for aerial robots is available as a preprint and under review.
Successfully defended my PhD dissertation, “Sensing Driven Surgical Autonomy Through Multimodal Tissue Representation,” at Duke University.
Our robotic surgery work for rural healthcare was featured in Bass Connections’ team-written project series.
Compliant Quasi Direct Drive End-Effector for Safe Robotic Ultrasound accepted at IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics.
Named STAUBLI Medical Robotics Rising Star at the International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR 2026) in Knoxville, TN — awarded at The Holistic Forum of Medical Robotics Junior Professors workshop.
Released Robotic Laser Surgery: Overview & Vision — a comprehensive video on our work on autonomous laser surgery and multimodal sensing.
See, Plan, Cut accepted at ICRA 2026.
PalpAid accepted at RoboSoft 2026.
2025
TumorMap paper submitted and available on arXiv.
Our aerial acoustic sensing research was featured in Duke Forest. Read the resulting SonicFly preprint.
Zach & Alexa’s “Where is the Boundary” (multimodal tissue boundary) accepted at ICRA Evolving Landscape of Surgical Robotics 2025. Kudos to both.
2024
Workshop “The Evolving Landscape of Surgical Robotics” accepted for ICRA 2025. See you 19 May in Atlanta.
Won Rhodes Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Research (Bass Connections: Reimagining Surgery for Rural Needs).
JMIR Aging — extracting critical info from clinicians’ notes to identify dementia severity.
Sampling-Based MPC for Volumetric Ablation (ICRA 2025) now online.
Compliant Quasi Direct Drive End-Effector for safe robotic ultrasound now online.
Zach Chen & Alexa Cahilig won Duke CoLab Research Award for tissue boundary test bench.
Bass Connection Student Research Award for affordable multimodal sensors for laser-tissue studies.
Talk at IIT Patna: “Innovating Surgical Robotics: Precision and Automation in Minimally Invasive Procedures”.
Scientific Reports — laser-induced fluorescence to differentiate spine tumor, muscle, and bone.
2023
DEI micro-award from Duke Graduate & Professional Student Government for mentorship.
3D Laser-and-Tissue Agnostic Surgical Planning accepted at IROS 2023.
Maclin Community Connections Grant for underrepresented undergraduates.
Duke India Initiative travel grant for portable diagnostics in India.
Presented brain-mimicking phantoms for photoablation at ISMR 2023 (Graduate School travel award).
2021
Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health Fellowship (unstructured EHR work with Dr. Hanzhang Xu).
2020
Dean’s Research Award for work on flexible sensors.