About

The journey so far: experience, education and teaching.

I started in mechanical design, building ring-throwing robots for Robocon, and moved steadily up the stack: arm motion planning, then embedded control and navigation, then SLAM and state estimation, and now multi-robot manipulation and learned policies. Most of what I build spans all three layers: the mechanism, the electronics and the software that runs on them.

Journey Full CV (PDF), opens in a new tab

Sep 2026

Niti Vahan goes live as the eYRC 2026-27 theme, selected by 1500 teams.
Jul 2026

Mentored three eYSIP 2026 projects: imitation learning on SO-101 and UR5 arms, and 3D LiDAR SLAM on a UAV.
Mar 2026

Ranked 32 / 62 internationally at the LeHome Challenge, IEEE ICRA 2026.
Feb 2026

Started research on grasp-anchored cooperative transport with two mobile manipulators.
Jan 2026

Review on soft mobile manipulators published in Industrial Robot.
Aug 2025 - Present

Senior Project Technical Assistant

ERTS Lab (e-Yantra), IIT Bombay
Competition theme R&D (Niti Vahan, Krishi CoBot), remote robotics labs, mentoring and outreach.
See the work: Senior Project Technical Assistant
May 2025 - Jul 2025

Research Intern, Visual SLAM for UAVs

eYSIP 2025, e-Yantra, IIT Bombay
Built a visual SLAM system from scratch in Open3D and OpenCV.
See the work: Research Intern, Visual SLAM for UAVs
Apr 2025

Graduated from NITK Surathkal with a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering.
May 2024 - Jul 2024

Research Intern

ARMS Lab, IIT Bombay (eYSIP 2024)
Built a ROS 2 Ackermann vehicle for field exploration, motors to Nav2.
See the work: Research Intern
Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

Robotics Intern

IITD-AIA Foundation for Smart Manufacturing, IIT Delhi
UR5 pick-and-place with MoveIt, from Gazebo to hardware.
2022 - Jul 2023

Mechanical Subsystem Member

CSD Robocon, NITK
Chassis and shooting mechanisms; NITK's first national qualification at DD Robocon 2023.
See the work: Mechanical Subsystem Member
Dec 2021

Started at NITK Surathkal.

Education

Dec 2021 - Apr 2025

B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering

National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal

Minor in Electronics and Communication Engineering

CGPA 8.22 / 10 (major) · 8.20 / 10 (minor)

Teaching and outreach

Mentored three eYSIP 2026 summer research projects and five interns.
Talk on imitation learning and VLAs with LeRobot and the SO-101 arm, for e-Yantra's SO-101 series (watch).
Two-day embedded systems Faculty Development Programmes for ~80 college professors in Bengaluru and Mysore.
Two-day ROS workshop for 40+ participants under e-Yantra's Women in Robotics initiative.
Electronics SIG Head, SAE NITK (2024-25): led year-long student projects in autonomous vehicles and robotics.