Andreas ten Pas

PhD Student

  • MS in Artificial Intelligence, Maastricht University - The Netherlands
  • BS in Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University - The Netherlands
  • Hometown: Drove, Germany
  • Field of Study: Computer Science
  • PhD Advisor: Robert Platt

Andreas ten Pas is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science program at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, advised by Professor Robert Platt. Andreas earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Knowledge Engineering and his Master of Science degree in Artificial Intelligence at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. 
Andreas is a native of Germany whose research interests include robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He is in the Helping Hands Lab, located in 214 West Village H. At Northeastern, Andreas researches perception algorithms for robotic grasping, and would like to eventually make the algorithms he develops available as open-source software, allowing as many people as possible to use the software with their own robotics research.

We published three papers on perception algorithms that find grasps on novel objects in unstructured environments. These papers are accompanied by open source software packages that can be used with many different robots.

My research interests are to apply computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and optimization techniques to practical problems in robotic grasping and manipulation.

One problem I would like to solve with my research is to make robots grasp arbitrary objects in the correct way in order to perform more complex manipulation tasks.

To solve a problem in robotics, we need to use the tools and the technology from a wide variety of areas because robots are complex systems. Furthermore, working on robots is a challenging balance between using what you studied and working on physical systems: you often encounter problems in practice that you did not expect in theory.

My goals are to become an experimental robotics person, to make the algorithms we develop available as open source software, and to have as many people as possible use that software with their robots in practical applications.

Maastricht University, The Netherlands. The main reason was because I wanted to study in an international environment, and Dutch universities attract people from all over the world.