Lorenzo Shaikewitz

Graduate Student, MIT AeroAstro

I am a graduate student at MIT AeroAstro advised by Prof. Luca Carlone. I'm broadly interested in bridging the gap between navigation and interaction, enabling robots to work in human spaces.

Previously, I was a Caltech undergrad (MechE & Controls, '23) advised by Prof. Aaron Ames and Prof. Günter Niemeyer. My undergraduate projects included a compliant ankle exoskeleton (with Maegan Tucker & Prof. Ames), an in-mouth feeding robot (with Prof. Dorsa Sadigh at Stanford), and a piano playing robot for ME 134 (with Prof. Niemeyer).

email // scholar // github // youtube

Research

In my masters I focused on finding global solutions to shape and pose estimation problems.

Uncertainty Quantification for Visual Object Pose Estimation: S-Lemma Ellipsoidal Bounds (Nov 2025)
Lorenzo Shaikewitz, Charis Georgiou, and Luca Carlone
T-RO / arXiv / code / video / bibTeX

Category-Level Object Shape and Pose Estimation in Less Than a Millisecond (Sep 2025)
Lorenzo Shaikewitz, Tim Nguyen, and Luca Carlone
arXiv / code / video / bibTeX

Master's Thesis: Optimization Techniques for Trustworthy 3D Object Understanding (May 2025)
Lorenzo Shaikewitz
D-Space / video / bibTeX

A Certifiable Algorithm for Simultaneous Shape Estimation and Object Tracking (Oct 2024)
Lorenzo Shaikewitz, Samuel Ubellacker, and Luca Carlone
RA-L / arXiv / code / video / bibTeX

During my undergrad I worked on assistive devices, including robotic feeding.

In-Mouth Robotic Bite Transfer with Visual and Haptic Sensing (May 2023)
Lorenzo Shaikewitz*, Yilin Wu*, Suneel Belkhale*, Jennifer Grannen, Priya Sundaresan, and Dorsa Sadigh
ICRA / arXiv / video / bibTeX

Blog

I occasionally write about problems I find interesting.
The Price of Optimality (Apr 15, 2026)
Does Optimality Scale? (Apr 15, 2026)
Visualizing Semidefinite Relaxations (Dec 10, 2025)
The moment-sum-of-squares hierarchy generalizes the Lagrangian (Oct 23, 2025)
all posts