The Team
Gangadhar Nageswar
Gangadhar Nageswar completed his B.Tech with Honors in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. His interests lies in the intersection of Machine Learning, Control Systems and Perception. During his time at IITB, he was a part of various robotics competitions where he majorly worked as a controls engineer. His undergraduate thesis and research experience mainly focuses on the application of deep learning for system identification and reinforcement learning for multi-robot systems. His current work at CMU majorly focuses on 3D Computer Vision and SLAM.
Ishir Roongta
Ishir is currently a graduate student in the MRSD program at CMU. He is passionate about Robotics and working towards Autonomous Systems to solve real-world problems. He has worked on a breadth of subsystems like controls, computer vision, planning and simulation during his time at Aerial Robotics Team of IIT Kanpur, and is keen on exploring opportunities to learn and collaborate with forward-thinking teams and contribute his skills.
Apart from robotics, Ishir loves doing photography, travelling and playing guitar.
Jaskaran Singh Sodhi
Jaskaran is a full-stack roboticist who is broadly interested in the application of deep learning for decision-making. During his time at IIT Kharagpur, he explored this through research in traditional SLAM and 3D vision, as well as learned heuristics for sampling-based planners.
Most recently, he has been exploring deep learning for 3D perception and odometry.
Kavin Kailash Ravie
Kavin earned his B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering and an Integrated M.Tech in Robotics from IIT Madras. Driven by a passion for creating scalable and robust intelligent aerial solutions for the industry, he has led multiple national-level industry-relevant competition teams to victory.
Since graduating, Kavin has collaborated with several startups to advance the state-of-the-art in safe and intelligent autonomous robots. His extensive experience spans UAS design, systems integration, GPS-denied navigation, motion planning, and guidance, navigation, and control (GNC).
Currently, at Carnegie Mellon University, Kavin is focused on the development, deployment, and testing of a resilient UAS autonomy stack for perceptually degraded environments. His work, which centers on under-canopy wildfire monitoring, is part of his MRSD capstone project and is advised by Dr. Sebastian Scherer at The AirLab.
Shashwat Chawla
Shashwat has been a firm believer in building robots that can automate repetitive and boring tasks. A background in Mechatronics Engineering from Thapar University has enabled him to play a significant role in constructing diverse components of a robotics system. Before CMU, he was a part of the founding team at Peer Robotics, a startup targeting automated material movement for SMEs. Here, he helped build the core autonomy stack for the mobile robots and contributed towards end-to-end integration of them in warehouses and manufacturing lines.
At CMU, he is exploring his interest in Perception and SLAM and finding practical applications for them in the real world.
Advisors
Professor Dimitrios (Dimi) Apostolopoulos
Professor John Dolan
Professor Sebastian Scherer