Summary
Avik De is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ghost Robotics, where he oversees the hardware and software architecture and mobility algorithms behind the company’s Vision 60 quadrupedal robot. A bio-inspired robotics researcher trained at Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, he co-founded Ghost Robotics in 2015 while still a PhD student, commercializing direct-drive legged-robot technology from Penn’s Kod*lab.
Career
De earned a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 2010, where he worked in Professor Noah Cowan’s LIMBS lab studying the neuromechanical control of juggling and graph-based SLAM (GRASP Lab; Kod*lab CV). He then pursued a PhD in robotics at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory (Kod*lab), advised by Professor Daniel Koditschek, completing his degree in September 2017. His doctoral research centered on bio-inspired design and modular, compositional control strategies for dynamic legged locomotion that generalize across robot platforms and behaviors such as hopping and running, and included hardware design work on a family of direct-drive legged robots that became the technical basis for Ghost Robotics’ products.
In January 2015, while still a PhD candidate, De co-founded Ghost Robotics alongside fellow Kod*lab researcher Gavin Kenneally and CEO Jiren Parikh. After completing his PhD, he continued in academia for several more years, holding a postdoctoral research position at Penn (2017-2018) and then at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Wyss Institute (2019-2020), where he was advised by Professor Rob Wood and worked on the design and control of insect-scale “RoboBee” flapping robots — bridging his interest in dynamic, bio-inspired locomotion across radically different scales, from micro-robots to Ghost Robotics’ dog-sized quadrupeds (Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute).
As Ghost Robotics’ CTO, De has been responsible for the overall hardware and software architecture of the company’s robots and the algorithms governing their mobility, through the commercial launch of Vision 60, its adoption by military and government customers, and LIG Nex1’s 2024 acquisition of a majority stake in the company (GSMA).
Source Notes
This profile draws on De’s LinkedIn profile, his University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab page and archived Kod*lab CV, a Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute seminar bio, a GSMA Smart Mobility profile, and a Penn Engineering feature on Ghost Robotics’ founding. His exact birth year and hometown are not disclosed in available sources and have been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.