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I am an Assistant Professor of the Engineering Design Department and currently heading the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

My research interests include developing intelligent grasping and manipulation algorithms, developing autonomous navigation solutions for mobile robots and multi-agent systems. I am a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Institution of Engineers (IEI)-India, The Robotics Society (TRI) - India and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). For more details on my prior research please refer to my personal blog.

Google Scholar, LinkedIn, GitHub
Click here for a brief CV


Education

Degree University Department Year
Ph.D. Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering 2019
M. Tech AcSIR-CMERI Mechatronics 2015
B. Tech University of Kerala Mechanical Engineering 2013


Academic Experience

  • Assistant Professor:
    • Department of Engineering Design, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
    • [November-2021-Present]


Industrial Experience

  • Product Owner:
    • Behaviors, Planning and Controls Team, Torc Robotics
    • [January, 2021 - November, 2021]
  • Software engineer:
    • Motion Planning Team, Torc Robotics
    • [November, 2019 - January, 2021]


Research Experience


Honors and Awards

  • Best Paper Award for our work titled “Intelligent Grasp Planning using Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation and Large Language Models” presented at the IEEE 4th International Conference on Smart Technologies for Power, Energy, and Control (STPEC 2025) at NIT, Goa, 10 – 13 December, 2025.
  • Award for Excellence in Teaching for the year 2025, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India
  • Best Presentation Award at the IEEE ICCAR 2024 Conference (27-29 April, 2024 ) for our work titled “Shared Control for Telepresence Robot in a Dynamic Virtual Reality Environment.”
  • Ideation contest 2014 - Certificate of Merit for “Detailed design of novel spherical robot”, TePP Outreach cum Cluster Innovation Center, CSIR-CMERI, Durgapur, India
  • Student Mechanism Design Contest - First Prize for “Design and integration of novel mechanism for plate washing”, iNaCoMM 2013, IIT Roorkee, India
  • Col. P. Vaidyanathan Memorial Endowment and K. Thomas Kora Memorial Award - Best Outgoing Mechanical Engineering Student College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, India; March 2014


Below is a recent post showcasing our lab's work at IIT-M