Shrutheesh Raman Iyer

Shrutheesh Raman Iyer

PhD Student

Purdue University

Hello there 👋.

I’m a robotics PhD student at the Computer Science Department at Purdue University, under Zak Kingston at the CoMMA lab. For the last two years (2023 – 2025), I worked as a robotics software engineer at Aurora Innovation, developing self-driving tech.

I’m interested in developing intelligent robot systems capable of contextual reasoning and action. I’d like to deploy these robots onto the noisy real world, where the robots can (1) infer underlying structures about the problem and the world, (2) synthesise feasible plan sequences exploiting the structure and prior experiences, and (3) execute them robustly, handling failures.

When I’m not doing robotics, you’d typically find me watching cricket or football (re: soccer) or passionately defending why the Eagles could not have carried the ring to Mordor.

Download my (semi-up-to-date) CV

Interests
  • Robotics
  • Task and Motion Planning
  • Constrained Planning
  • Long-horizon reasoning
Education
  • PhD in Computer Science, 2025-

    Purdue University

  • MS in CSE, 2021-2023

    University of California, San Diego

  • BE in CSE, 2016-2020

    RV College of Engineering

Organizations
A list of organizations I have been involved with:
Aurora CSE, UCSD UCSD Contextual Robotics Institute (CRI), UCSD Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, IISc Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Indian Institute of Management (IIMB) Project Jatayu RV QuizCorp RVCE Lightmetrics Citrix

Latest News

Life updates

Apr 21, 2026 Our work on Constrained Motion Planning is publically available and under review.
Feb 28, 2026 Our paper SPaSM has been accepted at ICRA 2026. See you in Vienna!
Jul 28, 2025 Started my PhD in CS at Purdue, the CoMMA lab with Prof. Zachary Kingston.
May 13, 2024 Our work on Foliated Manifolds Planning was accepted and presented at RSS2024.
Dec 11, 2023 Presented our work on service-home-robot at IEEE Robotic Computing (IRC) Conference 2023

Publications

Vectorizing Projection in Manifold-Constrained Motion Planning for Real-Time Whole-Body Control
2026 (Under Review)
Differentiable Particle Optimization for Fast Sequential Manipulation
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2026 (To Appear)
Motion Planning in Foliated Manifolds using Repetition Roadmap
Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, 2024
Household navigation and manipulation for everyday object rearrangement tasks
International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC), 2023