
I am currently a Senior Researcher in the Autonomous Systems group at Microsoft where I focus on the development of robust perception-action loops for safe autonomous systems that can be deployed in the real world. Some of my areas of interest are robot localization/navigation, representation learning, robust computer vision, and bio-inspired machine learning. I am especially passionate about unmanned aerial vehicles.
I received my PhD from the Texas A&M University, where I was part of the Unmanned Systems Lab headed by Srikanth Saripalli. My PhD thesis focused on collaborative localization and uncertainty-aware navigation for groups of micro aerial vehicles. During my PhD, I also worked on applying computer vision and machine learning to autonomous aerial/ground vehicle research, medical robotics, and precision agriculture applications.
Prior to that, I received my MS from the Arizona State University. During these years, as part of the Extreme Environment Robotics Lab, I worked on the design and development of several robotic platforms and sensory networks. One of these robots played a role in the discovery of microbial life in Antarctic subglacial lakes.
Research Interests
- Robot Perception and Planning
- Machine Learning
- Computer Vision
Education
- PhD (Robotics), 2019
Texas A&M University - M.S. (Electrical Engineering), 2013
Arizona State University - B.Tech. (Electrical Engineering), 2011
JNTU, India
News
- Mar 2021 : Our work on representation learning and reinforcement learning with event cameras is now out. See preprint, code, blogpost.
- Feb 2021 : Adversarial Attacks on Optimization based Planners accepted at ICRA 2021.
- Dec 2020 : Unadversarial Examples: our new work on designing objects inherently robust to vision models now out. Check out our paper and blogpost.
- 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.