Bio

I’m a robotics PhD student at the CS Department at Purdue, working at the CoMMA lab with Prof. Zak Kingston. I’m an aspiring roboticist interested in building intelligent systems capable of reasoning and action, working on problems ranging from active perception to planning.

Over the last two years (2023–2025), I worked as a perception software engineer at Aurora Innovation, building perception systems for self-driving trucks.

I graduated from UC San Diego with a master’s in Computer Science, specializing in robotics, where I worked on task planning for robot manipulation and service robotics under Prof. Henrik Christensen. I completed my thesis on developing a planning framework for innovative tool use by encoding causal affordances in symbolic planning. I also worked on experience-based Task and Motion Planning for manipulation, and on a general-purpose home robot, presented at RSS 2024 and IRC 2023 respectively.

For my undergraduate thesis at RV College of Engineering (RVCE), India, I interned at the Robert Bosch Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, Indian Institute of Science (RBCCPS, IISc), under Prof. Raghu Krishnapuram and Prof. Bharadwaj Amrutur, and later continued as a technical associate there, working on autonomous navigation and robot teleoperation.

My interest in this domain took shape during two summer internships at Lightmetrics Pvt Ltd (2018, 2019), where I worked on compressing object detection networks and statistical report generation.

At RVCE, I was a member of Project Jatayu, the autonomous UAV team, serving as team lead for the SUAS 2019 competition — representing India in an international UAV competition held in Maryland, USA. That’s when my interest in robotics and autonomous navigation really took hold.

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