Odest Chadwicke “Chad” Jenkins is a professor of robotics and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. He leads the Laboratory for Progress (Perceptive RObotics and Grounded REasoning SystemS). His work and collaborations aim to discover methods that will enable robots to effectively learn from and assist people. This research pertains primarily to robot learning from demonstration, semantic perception, and mobile manipulation toward enabling the usability of this technology by people in real situations. His open-source approach to scholarship emphasizes a balance of theory and practice, a balance of research and teaching, and prioritization of equity and excellence. 

Jenkins’s active projects include Semantic Robot Programming for declarative robot programming from demonstration, taskable planning and control for bipedal humanoids and mobile manipulators, perceptual reasoning for goal-directed robotic manipulation, fast nonparametric belief propagation for manipulation in clutter and multirobot coordination, independent living technologies for aging populations, and Distributed Teaching Collaboratives for open-source course development. 

He is the founding chair of the Michigan Robotics Undergraduate Program and led the creation of Michigan’s robotics major; served as inaugural editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction; and is currently a member of the ACM Council for the Association for Computing Machinery, a member of the Board of Trustees for the CNA Corporation, and vice president for educational activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. 

He can be found on LinkedIn.