Marylee WilliamsTuesday, January 20, 2026Print this page.

Robotics Institute Assistant Professor Shubham Tulsiani received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to develop perception systems that better understand the 3D world.

Shubham Tulsiani, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project developing perception systems to better understand the 3D world. The CAREER Award is the NSF’s most prestigious recognition for early career faculty.

Tulsiani’s project aims to bridge the gap between how machines, such as robots, perceive the 3D world and their understanding of how actions impact the world they’re observing. The researchers plan to develop ways to understand the actions machines can perform in the world and their effects, as well as methods to both scale this type of learning and turn these perceptions into real-world actions.

"A robot watching a video of a human using a cleaning spray, for example, should understand that the person pressed the nozzle, which went down. When the robot later encounters a new spray bottle, it should know that this pressing down is an allowed action," Tulsiani said. "The main technical challenge this proposal addresses is that the desired understanding is for 3D representation but the observations, such as internet videos, are only 2D. The research will develop mechanisms to bridge the 2D-3D gap.

Tulsiani said a large share of credit for this award should go to his Ph.D. students, who conducted the early work that led to this research proposal.

Read more about this project on the NSF’s website.