Research

Background

In Fall 2018, during my undergraduate studies, I attended a seminar which dissected the working of commonly used flight controllers on aerial vehicles. It simplified their operation from this obscure notion of automation in our everyday skies to an understandable electronic system that controls a vehicle to follow a planned path.

In the following weeks, I joined a competitive student team that worked on autonomous aerial vehicles. I got to work on GPS-aided autonomous navigation for applications such as obstacle avoidance, imagery, and air delivery. In the following months, I became highly familiar with off-the-shelf embedded controllers and software that could be used to achieve autonomy for various mobile robots, including aerial vehicles, ground vehicles, and underwater vehicles.

While I became comfortable with building and operating such mobile robots, I wanted to learn how to control them. I joined the Data Augmented Control of Autonomous Systems (DACAS) Lab, led by Dr. Jishnu Keshavan, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. My work here involves simulation and experimentation of various adaptive control strategies for mobile robot navigation and applications such as formation control and autonomous landing.