Having been born into a family with three generations of engineers, curiosity was the natural mood of the home I grew up in. My engineering journey began right in high school when I started building RC aircraft to satiate my passion for aviation.

Reading about electronics and flight dynamics online, I started building fixed-wing RC aircraft from scratch. The process of fabricating air-worthy aircraft frames, integrating electronics and watch them take flight laid my passion-filled foundation for a career in robotics engineering.

To now fortify my hobby turned passion, I pursued an undergraduate program in mechanical engineering to develop knowledge in subjects of mechanics, aerodynamics, and programming. As part of my undergraduate course, I authored a thesis on plasma actuators for flow induction inside hollow pipes, the experiments of which were conducted at the Propulsion Lab at the Aerospace Department of IIT, Mumbai (Bombay). Having observed splendid results, my team and I decided to apply for a utility patent for the same.

With exciting developments in the space of Deep Learning and limitations of innovation in mechanical engineering, the natural next step in my journey was to pursue a master's program that helps me develop the necessary skills to build autonomy for robots. This led me to pursue MS in Robotics Engineering at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Shortly after joining, I was selected to represent WPI at the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Extreme Challenge 2022 where my team and I built a robot that traverses Martian surface. My stint at WPI largely focuses on subject matters of robot perception. For this, I assisted in research at WPI robotics engineering labs like HiRo Human Inspired Robotics Lab, Popovic Labs and Surface Metrology Labs. My experience here involved developing fundamental foundation through hands on experience with classical computer vision algorithms, deep learning techniques and other sensors for object detection, image segmentation, pose estimation, homography estimation, SLAM and much more. My career interest lies in leveraging learning methods to enhance robot perception.

WPI provided me with opportunity for working at the Popovic Lab, Surface Meteorology Lab & Human Inspired Robotics Lab which enriched my skill-set with invaluable experiences of solving engineering problems with computer vision & machine learning techniques.

Through this cover letter, I would like to highlight one of the exciting projects I was a part of under the capstone experience at WPI. The project was tailored to cater home owners for maintaining real time fire safety preparedness. After extensive consultations with the Chief and Deputy Chief of the Worcester Fire Department, my team and I developed a novel approach for preventing fatalities during fire hazard situations with SLAM, computer vision and motion planning methods. This experience demonstrates my technical skills, ability of stakeholder engagements, identifying the problem statements & think critically to build robotics solution tailored for the end user.