Micah Nye

Hello There. I am a PhD in Robotics student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy with Profs. Wenshan Wang and Sebastian Scherer in the AirLab. I previously completed my MS in Robotics at CMU RI as an Inaugural Rales Fellow. Prior to joining CMU, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering.

I am interested in dynamics modeling for robot navigation—accurate models for MPC, priveleged models with RL frameworks, or models as physics simulators. I primarily explore this interest in unstructured environments like the off-road wilderness. I create dynamics models that are made terrain-aware through perception conditioning and am exploring adaptive and uncertainty-awareness for risk reduction. I’m happiest in the field, where the stakes and failures are real. I trust my models with my life (literally) while I ride inside our autonomous ATV and push it to the limit at 10+ m/s.

While at Pitt, I worked on a separate dynamically interesting problem: adversarial planning and localization on autonomous racecars traveling 150+ mph. Our robots raced on famous F1 circuits like Monza.

Outside research, I am a big cinephile, a music lover, a gamer, and a hiker. I also love collecting physical media (vinyls, movies, video games, and books). Explore the page a bit to find out more about me 🔎

News

[Sep 2026] 🎉 Accepted at CoRL 2026! My work on perception-conditioned dynamics models for off-road driving: arXiv, website, video.
[Aug 2026] 🚀 I started my PhD in Robotics at CMU!
[Aug 2026] 🎓 I successfully defended my M.S. Robotics Thesis! Read more here.
[May 2025] 🎉 I presented the BETTY Dataset at ICRA 2025.
[Aug 2024] 🚀 I started my M.S. Robotics at CMU.
[Apr 2024] 🏆 I received the inaugural CMU Rales Fellowship.

Selected Publications

Structured Perception Representations for Off-road Dynamics Learning

Micah Nye, Samuel Triest, Matthew Sivaprakasam, and 3 more authors

In Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026

arXiv Website Bib

@inproceedings{nye2026struc,
  title = {Structured Perception Representations for Off-road Dynamics Learning},
  author = {Nye, Micah and Triest, Samuel and Sivaprakasam, Matthew and Adu, Isaiah and Scherer, Sebastian and Wang, Wenshan},
  booktitle = {Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  eprint = {2610.22900},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22900},
}

BETTY Dataset: A Multi-modal Dataset for Full-Stack Autonomy

Micah Nye, A. Raji, Andrew Saba, and 9 more authors

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

arXiv Website DOI Bib

@inproceedings{nye2025betty,
  title = {{BETTY} Dataset: A Multi-modal Dataset for Full-Stack Autonomy},
  author = {Nye, Micah and Raji, A. and Saba, Andrew and Erlich, E. and Exley, R. and Goyal, A. and Matros, A. and Misra, R. and Sivaprakasam, Matthew and Bertogna, M. and Ramanan, Deva and Scherer, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2025},
  pages = {2453--2460},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127350},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07266v1},
}

TartanDrive 3: Scaling Full-Stack Data Across Modalities, Behaviors, and Extreme Environments

Micah Nye^†, Matthew Sivaprakasam^†, Saksham Sharma, and 9 more authors

In Submission

Distilling Global Traversability Priors for Image-based Affordance Prediction in Off-road Environments

Matthew Sivaprakasam, Samuel Triest, Micah Nye, and 5 more authors

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

arXiv Website Bib

@inproceedings{sivaprakasam2026distilling,
  title = {Distilling Global Traversability Priors for Image-based Affordance Prediction in Off-road Environments},
  author = {Sivaprakasam, Matthew and Triest, Samuel and Nye, Micah and Atha, Deegan and Khattak, Shehryar and Fan, David and Wang, Wenshan and Scherer, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  eprint = {2607.17984},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17984},
}

A Quantitative Analysis of Undergraduate Researchers’ Intent to Apply to Graduate School

R. Burcin, Micah Nye, I. Adu, and 2 more authors

In IEEE World Engineering Education Conference (EDUNINE), 2026

Paper Bib

@inproceedings{nye2026weec,
  title = {A Quantitative Analysis of Undergraduate Researchers' Intent to Apply to Graduate School},
  author = {Burcin, R. and Nye, Micah and Adu, I. and Mruthyunjaya, V. and Dolan, J. M.},
  booktitle = {IEEE World Engineering Education Conference (EDUNINE)},
  year = {2026},
  month = mar,
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11546908},
}

TartanDrive 2.0: More Modalities and Better Infrastructure to Further Self-Supervised Learning Research in Off-Road Driving Tasks

Matthew Sivaprakasam, Parv Maheshwari, Mateo Guaman Castro, and 6 more authors

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

arXiv Website Code Paper DOI Bib

@inproceedings{sivaprakasam2024tartandrive2,
  title = {{TartanDrive} 2.0: More Modalities and Better Infrastructure to Further Self-Supervised Learning Research in Off-Road Driving Tasks},
  author = {Sivaprakasam, Matthew and Maheshwari, Parv and Castro, Mateo Guaman and Triest, Samuel and Nye, Micah and Willits, S. and Saba, Andrew and Wang, Wenshan and Scherer, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2024},
  pages = {12606},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10611265},
  url = {https://theairlab.org/TartanDrive2/assets/TartanDrive_2_0_ICRA_2024.pdf},
}

Fast and Modular Autonomy Software for Autonomous Racing Vehicles

Andrew Saba, Aderotimi Adetunji, Adam Johnson, and 27 more authors

Field Robotics, 2024

now retitled as IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics

arXiv Paper DOI Bib

@article{saba2024racing,
  title = {Fast and Modular Autonomy Software for Autonomous Racing Vehicles},
  author = {Saba, Andrew and Adetunji, Aderotimi and Johnson, Adam and Kothari, Aadi and Sivaprakasam, Matthew and Spisak, Joshua and Bharatia, Prem and Chauhan, Arjun and Duff, Jr., Brendan and Gasparro, Noah and King, Charles and Larkin, Ryan and Mao, Brian and Nye, Micah and Parashar, Anjali and Attias, Joseph and Balciumas, Aurimas and Brown, Austin and Chang, Chris and Gao, Ming and Heredia, Cindy and Keats, Andrew and Lavariega, Jose and Muckleroy, III, William and Slavescu, Andre and Stathas, Nicholas and Suvarna, Nayana and Zhang, Cin Tuan and Scherer, Sebastian and Ramanan, Deva},
  journaltitle = {Field Robotics},
  volume = {4},
  pages = {1--45},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.55417/fr.2024001},
  note = {now retitled as IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics},
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10876003},
}

Simulation and Control for Learning Collision-free Navigation for Aerial Vehicles

Micah Nye, Micah Corah, and Sebastian Scherer

Robotics Institute of Summer Scholars Working Papers Journal, 2023

Poster Paper Bib

@article{nye2023riss,
  title = {Simulation and Control for Learning Collision-free Navigation for Aerial Vehicles},
  author = {Nye, Micah and Corah, Micah and Scherer, Sebastian},
  journaltitle = {Robotics Institute of Summer Scholars Working Papers Journal},
  volume = {11},
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZlZ-vXaElgNgiJP2SVWEBw89i3ssk5hl/view?usp=share_link},
}

TartanDrive 1.5: Improving Large Multimodal Robotics Dataset Collection and Distribution

Matthew Sivaprakasam, Samuel Triest, Mateo Guaman Castro, and 6 more authors

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop on Pretraining for Robotics (PT4R), 2023

Paper Bib

@inproceedings{sivaprakasam2023tartandrive15,
  title = {{TartanDrive} 1.5: Improving Large Multimodal Robotics Dataset Collection and Distribution},
  author = {Sivaprakasam, Matthew and Triest, Samuel and Castro, Mateo Guaman and Nye, Micah and Maulimov, Mukhtar and Ho, Cherie and Maheshwari, Parv and Wang, Wenshan and Scherer, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop on Pretraining for Robotics (PT4R)},
  year = {2023},
  keywords = {workshop},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=7Y1pnhFJUT},
}

Selected Community Engagement

Robotics Summer Camp United Way Venango County Read more

Page Coming Soon Robotics Summer Course Northside Partnership Project

Professional Service

Peer reviewer for CoRL, RA-L, T-RO, ICRA, IROS from 2024—Present
[Sep 2026] Workshop Organizer for IROS 2026 Workshop on Bridging Perspectives in Navigation
[Jun 2025] Workshop Co-Organizer for RSS 2025 Workshop on Resilient Off-road Autonomous Robotics
[Mar 2024] Organizer for undergraduate Intro to ROS Robotics Workshop