Tess Hellebrekers

I am currently a Research Scientist at Meta AI Research. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Meta AI Research working with Professor Abhinav Gupta. My thesis work, “Hybrid Soft Sensing in Robotic Systems”, was completed with Professor Carmel Majidi in the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in 2020.

My early research focused on developing soft and stretchable sensors for robotic applications. This includes sensing skins for hybrid robots (conventional robots with compliant surfaces) and fully-soft robots (robots made of completely compliant materials). I have experience building systems with audio, capacitive, resistive, and most prominently, magnetic sensing.

These days I am most curious about sensor and systems integration for dexterous manipulation. Ultimately, I want to learn what it takes to teach robots how to understand and operate in unstructured, everyday environments.