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

I'm starting to work on Bayesian interpretations of sums-of-squares.

Global Function Modeling and Minimization with SOS Bayesian Optimization (Jul 2026)
Lorenzo Shaikewitz and Frederike Duembgen
RSS Workshop / code / bibTeX

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
ICRA / 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

See here for additional selected papers, and visit google scholar for all my publications.

Blog

I occasionally write about problems I find interesting.
Visualizing semidefinite relaxations (Dec 10, 2025)
The moment-sum-of-squares hierarchy generalizes the Lagrangian (Oct 23, 2025)
A small index of my Julia packages (Jun 19, 2025)
Revisiting CAST: World-Frame Motion Model (Feb 24, 2025)
all posts