I am a graduate research student from Robotics Research Center at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad with research experience in adaptive controllers for Euler-Lagarangian systems. My research is towards complete autonomy of payload carrying aerial robots. On this pursuit, I have proposed and implemented adaptive controllers for drones to tackle uncertainties in modelling the dynamics and external disturbances. I am looking for opportunities for doctoral research in the fields of state constrained adaptive controller and control-aware trajectory planning. CV (PDF)»

Work Experience

• Software Engineer at KPIT Technologies: Developed and integrated inter-ECU communication and diagnostic modules for automotive projects such as ADAS using AUTOSAR standards (2015-2018).
• Researach Intern at IIIT Hyderabad: Conducting research in control and planning of aerial robots. (2019-Present).

Publications

• IROS 2021 “Efficient Manoeuvring of Quadrotor under Constrained Space and Predefined Accuracy”, S. Ganguly, V. N. Sankaranarayanan, B. V. S. G. Suraj, R. Yadav and S. Roy, submitted for review to IROS, 2021.
• IROS 2021 “Elasticopter: Feasibility Study on Mechanism and Control of a Novel Reconfigurable Quadcopter”, B. V. S. G. Suraj, V. N. Sankaranarayanan, R. Yadav, S. Roy and K. M. Krishna, submitted for review to IROS, 2021.
• IROS 2020 "Aerial Transportation of Unknown Payloads: Adaptive Path Tracking for Quadrotors",V. N. Sankaranarayanan, S. Roy and S. Baldi, 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2020, pp. 7710-7715, doi: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341402.
• TMECH 2020 "Artificial-Delay Adaptive Control for Under-actuated Euler-Lagrange Robotics", Spandan Roy, Simone Baldi, Peng Li and Viswa Narayan, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, doi: 10.1109/TMECH.2021.3052068.
• OCAM 2020 "Introducing switched adaptive control for quadrotors for vertical operations", Viswa N. Sankaranarayanan and Spandan Roy, Optimal Control Applications and Methods, 2020; 41: 1875– 1888. doi: 10.1002/oca.2595.

Awards and Honors

• IIIT Hyderabad research fellowship, Awarded a fellowship to cover tuition and living expenses during my Masters.
• RoboGames'15, Won Bronze Medal in FreeStyle for our humanoid.

Projects

• Dynamic aerial payload delivery: An aerial robot carrying a package follows a mobile ground robot autonomously and delivers the package on the ground robot while it is running.
• Elasticopter: A novel shape-changing quadrotor mechanism and its controller are designed for carrying payloads of different sizes and masses efficiently.
• Obstacle avoidance for aerial robot: An environment is mapped using OctoMap with the help of visual-inertial sensors and obstacles are avoided by generating an RRT* based trajectory, which is further smoothened by fitting a minimum snap trajectory over it.
• Biped Locomotion: A 3-feet Biped is designed and its kinematics is modelled to create a trajectory for its locomotion.
• Writing Robot: A 3-DoF arm is designed to write the letters spoken to it through speech input.

Courses

• Statistical Methods in AI
• Mobile Robotics
• Intro to Robotics
• Advances in Robotics and Control
• Topics in Applied Optimization

Teaching Assistant Experience

• Robotics: Dynamics and Control during Spring 2020 at IIIT Hyderabad.
• Advances in Robotics and Control during Monsoon 2021 at IIIT Hyderabad.