STARS Lab

Prof. Kelly is the Director of the STARS Laboratory; his research is focused on understanding how autonomous machines can successfully interact with the world, by building internal models of state and deriving sufficient statistics. His interests include collaborative robotics, robot learning, robot manipulation, multimodal sensing, and probabilistic and geometric methods for estimation, planning, and control.

He holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Collaborative Robotics and was Dean’s Catalyst Professor (an early-career award for research excellence) from 2018 to 2021. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Prof. Kelly received his PhD degree in 2011 from the University of Southern California; at USC, he was a member of the first cohort of Annenberg Fellows. Before starting graduate school, he was a Software Engineer in the Space Technologies division of the Canadian Space Agency.