I am a final year Ph.D. candidate in the April Lab at the University of Michgan advised by Edwin Olson and am even more excited about building intelligent systems. My research enables reliable autonomous navigation in dynamic social environments. Along the way, I have enjoyed working on SLAM, localization and perception systems for several field-robotics applications and projects sponsored by DARPA, the Office of Naval Research and the United States Postal Service.

I am equally passionate about commercializing technology to impact society and have been a Student Advisor at the Wolverine Venture Fund, the world's first student-run Venture Capital Fund. I was drawn towards business during my sophomore year through my involvement with Let's Be Well Red, a social venture which aims at combating iron-deficiency anemia in India by providing a solution in the form of an affordable, nutritional bar (GudNeSs). Apart from managing a diverse team, various events and potential clients as CEO, I spread the movement to the state of Tamil Nadu through the National Social Service wing at IIT Madras. I enjoyed engaging people and motivating them towards a cause, and saw the positive impact a simple idea can have on society.

I am actively seeking full-time opportunities to help create and commercialize innovative autonomous services.

Prior to grad school, I initiated a collaboration between Ron Parr (Duke University) and Balaraman Ravindran (IIT-Madras) towards my master's thesis on reinforcement learning for Lipschitz-continuous value functions.

My research has been generoursly supported by the J. Robert Beyster fellowship for innovative computational research (2017-2018), the Office of Naval Research (2016-2017) and the Rackham Graduate fellowship (2015-2016)

Reliable Navigation in Dynamic Environments using Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM)

Why is reliable navigation challenging?

Multi-Policy Decision Making

Risk-aware MPDM: Making policy evaluation more reliable

Towards increased flexibility in the decision making

Zippy (USPS)

Mailbox-to-mailbox mobility and alignment

SmartCarts

Low-speed autonomous vehicle fleet service

SqadMATE (DARPA)

Localize soldiers on the battlefield using ground and aerial robotic platforms