I work on perception and control for fast-paced off-road ground vehicle autonomy at Overland AI since February 2024.

I finished a post-doc with Matthias Müller and Vladlen Koltun in April 2022, followed by a Research Scientist role, at Intel Labs. I worked on policy learning for contact-rich robot manipulation and navigation, and simulation for embodied agents.

My PhD work in Robotics at Georgia Tech was advised by James Hays. I also worked closely with Charlie Kemp. My PhD thesis was on observing and predicting hand-object interaction during human grasping, especially from the contact perspective. I have a Masters degree in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania, where my thesis was advised by Kostas Daniilidis, and a bachelor's degree in electronics from Nirma University, India.

Research

OpenBot-Fleet: A System for Collective Learning with Real Robots ICRA '24

We upgraded the OpenBot robot for distributed on-robot RL and sim2real, then learned PointGoal navigation policies with 70+ OpenBots.

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The Un-Kidnappable Robot: Acoustic Localization of Sneaking People ICRA '24

A robot audio model that can detect where people are using only the incidental sounds they produce as they move, even when they try to be quiet.

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PressureVision: Estimating Hand Pressure from a Single RGB Image ECCV '22 (Oral)

Model and dataset for predicting continuous hand contact with planar surfaces from a single RGB image.

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Visual Pressure Estimation and Control for Soft Robotic Grippers IROS '22

Model and dataset for predicting continuous robot gripper contact with planar surfaces from a single RGB image.

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ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps CVPR '21 (Oral)

Differentiable hand-object contact model that sits on top of image-based hand pose estimators and improves the contact correctness of their predictions.

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ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose ECCV '20 | Summer Internship 2019 (Facebook Reality Labs, Sausalito CA)

Large grasp dataset with contact maps, hand pose, object pose, and 2.9 M RGB-D grasp images.

paper website bib data, code, and models slides ECCV talk


Towards Markerless Grasp Capture CVPR '19 Workshop on CV For AR/VR

Preliminary results on a completely markerless grasp (hand pose + object pose) capture algorithm.

paper website


ContactGrasp

ContactGrasp: Functional Multi-finger Grasp Synthesis from Contact IROS 2019 | Summer Internship 2018 (NVIDIA Research, Seattle)

Functional grasp synthesis for kinematically diverse end-effectors, using human demonstrations of grasping from ContactDB.

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ContactDB

ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging CVPR 2019 (Oral, Best Paper Finalist) | Fall 2018

First-ever dataset of high-resolution contact during human grasping.

paper website bib poster slides data, code and models CVPR talk


Summer 2017

Geometry-Aware Learning of Maps for Camera Localization CVPR 2018 (Spotlight) | Summer Internship 2017 (NVIDIA Research, Santa Clara)

Geometric constraints and semi-supervised learning for better image-based camera localization.

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arXiv

DeepNav: Learning to Navigate Large Cities CVPR 2017

Learning to navigate large cities by training convolutional neural networks to make a navigation decision from the current street-view image.

paper arXiv bib poster code and models


WACV 2017

StuffNet: Using 'Stuff' to Improve Object Detection IEEE WACV 2017

Improving deep-learning object detection by looking at 'stuff' surrounding objects.

paper arXiv bib code and models slides poster


BMVC 2015

Occlusion-Aware Object Localization, Segmentation and Pose Estimation BMVC 2015

Detection, segmentation and 3D pose estimation of partially occluded objects.

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Masters Thesis

Masters' Thesis UPenn, Fall 2014

Detection and segmentation of partially occluded objects.

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PR2 Research

3D Pose Estimation Summer 2013 / ICRA 2014

We made GRASPY, Penn's PR2 robot detect and estimate the 6-DOF pose of household objects, all from one 2D image.

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Robocup

RoboCup Kid Size League Summer 2013

Our Team DARwIN won the Humanoid Kid Size League world championships.

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Summer 2011

Kinect-based Object Segmentation for Grasping Summer 2011

We used a Kinect to segment spherical and cylindrical objects lying on a table, so that a robotic arm could be guided to their 3D position.

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Practical OpenCV

Practical OpenCV 2013, book with more than 82 K downloads

A detailed C++ guide for OpenCV through practical projects.

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