Bijo Sebastian
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.
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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
- Graduate Research Assistant — Robotics & Mechatronics Lab, Virginia Tech
- January 2016 – October 2019
- Project Fellow — Surface Robotics Lab, CSIR – CMERI
- June 2014 – November 2015
Honors and Awards
- Best Paper Award for “Intelligent Grasp Planning using Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation and Large Language Models” at IEEE STPEC 2025, NIT Goa, December 2025.
- Award for Excellence in Teaching for the year 2025, IIT Madras.
- Best Presentation Award at IEEE ICCAR 2024 for “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, CSIR-CMERI, Durgapur, India.
- Student Mechanism Design Contest — First Prize for “Design and integration of novel mechanism for plate washing”, iNaCoMM 2013, IIT Roorkee.
- Col. P. Vaidyanathan Memorial Endowment and K. Thomas Kora Memorial Award — Best Outgoing Mechanical Engineering Student, College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, March 2014.
Below is a recent post showcasing our lab’s work at IIT Madras: