Hi! Welcome to my web-page.
I'm a graduate student pursuing my doctoral degree at Purdue University. I am a
Graduate Research Assistant under
Prof. Jeffrey Mark Siskind.
My principal research interests lie in the field of Cognitive Robotics; a
confluence of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Cognition. My recent
research involves work on the robotics and vision segments of a long-term
project to ground language in perception.
In 2009, we finished work on a preliminary system that could play simple games
(tic-tac-toe, hexapawn, and a few variants of hexapawn) through a robotic arm,
watch the games being played, and learn the rules of the game independent of the
system initially playing the game. The robotic system for this effort was
effected using kinematics through gradient descent, and vision providing the
cues for game-play. We have a paper on this effort, currently accepted for
publication in
ICRA2010.
We are currently involved in the task of Assembly Imitation. The goal is to
create a fully autonomous system that can encode abstract notions about physical
structures such as walls, windows etc. in a domain independent fashion, thus
enabling the *same* notions to be encoded for actual physical instantiation,
i.e, domain dependent notions, in terms of the specifics of the assembly
hardware.
For further details, take a look at my
Research page.
----------------------------------
During my under-graduation, I worked on a Do-It-Yourself Virtual Reality based
Laparoscopic Simulator under the guidance of
Dr.M.Manivannan,
IIT-Madras, India, and together with
Dr.Suresh Devasahayam
and
Dr.George Mathew
(from Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, India), I implemented a
part-task Laparoscopic simulator, constructed purely from off-the-shelf parts
(webcams, enclosures, etc.), providing a robust, low-cost alternative to
existing systems.
Our system was selected to appear in poster form at the 17th Medicine Meets
Virtual Reality conference, held in Long Beach, California in January
2009. The open-source code, materials required, costs involved and
instructions to setup the system, can be found
here
We signed an MOU with
Viswire, (a
virtual simulation company in Chennai, India), to further develop the system.