Chris Thierauf, PhD
Ocean Robotics and Autonomy Researcher
I’m a Research Engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
I research autonomous partners for scientific exploration of challenging domains. I mostly work with and help deploy the full-ocean depth Sentry AUV.
I’m currently at-sea. Expect email delays.
Recent Updates
Bard College Talk
march 2026
I’ll be presenting on my recent work in a seminar at Bard College. Find relevant notes and links here.
Symbolic Planning: A gentle introduction
january 2026
An introduction to symbolic planning, AI, and formal logics. Aimed at grad students/professionals, or advanced undergraduates. Also, some code for you.
Mariana Trench Fieldwork
march 2026
I’m at-sea until mid-march with the Sentry AUV. We’ll be performing at-sea data collection to learn about some of the oldest geologic formations on earth, which informs modern interpretations of data.
OCEANS (IEEE MTS)
october 2025
A new robot autonomy architecture, based on cognitive architecture and long horizon planning principles. I developed and tested this on-board Sentry, and a publication is now available.
ICDL
september 2025
Matthias Scheutz (director of the Tufts HRILab) presented our work on generating RL simulations to help robots solve novelties.