I am the co-founder of Scaled Foundations, an AI research and deployment company building safe general robot intelligence through foundation models and simulation.

Prior to this, I was a Senior Researcher at the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Group at Microsoft. My research focused on foundation models for robotics, data-driven simulation, and robust computer vision, and I led the efforts of training large-scale multimodal representation learning models. I received my PhD from the Texas A&M University in 2019, where I was part of the Unmanned Systems Lab headed by Prof. Srikanth Saripalli.

My primary area of interest is the development of the next generation of robot autonomy that is generalizable, safe, and widely accessible. I am especially passionate about unmanned aerial vehicles. Over the course of my career, I have worked on several problem spaces such as robot perception and planning, large scale machine learning, computer vision, and simulation.

Education

  • Ph.D. (Robotics), Texas A&M University - 2019
  • M.S. (Electrical Engineering), Arizona State University - 2013
  • B.Tech. (Electrical Engineering), JNTU, India - 2011

News

  • Oct 2023 : Gave invited talks at the Workshop on Photorealistic Simulation for Robotics and the Workshop on Robotic Perception and Mapping at IROS 2023.
  • Sep 2023 : We released the preview of our General Robot Intelligence Development (GRID) platform that combines foundation models and simulation to accelerate robotics development. Check out our technical report.
  • Jul 2023 : Two papers accepted at IROS and ICCV 2023.
  • May 2023 : I co-organized the first Pretraining for Robotics workshop at ICRA 2023.
  • Apr 2023 : I am serving as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2023.
  • Feb 2023 : Our latest work on using ChatGPT for robotics applications is out! Check out our blogpost, paper, and code.
  • Jan 2023 : One paper accepted at ICRA 2023.
  • Sep 2022 : Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2022.
  • Jun 2022 : Two papers accepted at IROS 2022.
  • May 2022 : Acknowledged as an Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2022.
  • Apr 2022 : Selected as a Highlighted Reviewer for ICLR 2022.
  • Sep 2021 : Unadversarial Examples and Representation Learning for Event Cameras accepted at NeurIPS 2021.
  • Sep 2021 : Acknowledged as an Outstanding Reviewer at ICCV 2021.
  • Feb 2021 : Adversarial Attacks on Optimization based Planners accepted at ICRA 2021.
  • Sep 2020: Our paper on safe deep control policies has been selected as a finalist for the Best Paper Award on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics at IROS 2020.
  • Jul 2020: Gave a Microsoft Research webinar on AirSim and autonomous systems research.
  • Mar 2020: We released AirSim Drone Racing Lab, an AirSim-based simulator aimed at enabling autonomous drone racing research.
  • Dec 2019: Game of Drones, a simulated autonomous drone racing competition hosted by our group took place at NeurIPS 2019.
  • Jul 2019: Joined the Autonomous Systems group at Microsoft.
  • May 2019: Received my PhD degree from Texas A&M University.
  • Feb 2018: One paper accepted at ICUAS 2018.
  • Jan 2018: One paper accepted at ICRA 2018.
  • Sep 2017: Gave a talk at the Workshop on Complex Collaborative Systems, IROS 2017.