I am interested in the areas of Robotics, and Embodied Artificial Intelligence. My general interest lies in developing artificial agents that are cheap, portable and capable of exhibiting complex behaviors in unknown situations. More specifically, my current attention is focused towards solving contact rich dexterous manipulation with free objects.
Biological designs are a result of years of evolution. They are effective, efficient and conceal within themselves enormous wisdom -- mechanical as well as intellectual. Complex movements exhibited by the animal kingdom is a result of a tightly integrated system of bio-muscular structures and fast reactive motor control. If artificial counterparts are to exhibit comparable behaviors, the solution is likely to be situated at the intersection of mechanism and computation.
My research focuses on bridging the divide between "what is possible algorithmically in simulations" and "what works on the real hardware" by reasoning at the intersection of mechanism details and algorithms. I use the tools from traditional robotics, optimal control, optimization, and machine learning to design robust sample-efficient techniques that scale to and succeed on the physical hardware.
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