Ms. Sonam Kharade (MTech, PhD, VJTI)

Leading a Project RASPBERRY SI

in collaboration with

NASA JPL, NASA Ames, ABLE group, CMU

@ NASA, JPL- CalTech, USA

Ms. Sonam Kharade, VJTI, has completed her MTech in Control System specialisation and later on joined for PhD in 2018 under supervision of Prof. Navdeep M. Singh. After submitting her PhD thesis in VJTI, she accepted the offer and started working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Computer Science Department at University of South Carolina (UoSC), USA where she is leading the NASA funded project named RASPBERRY SI. 

The research project is in collaboration with NASA JPL, NASA Ames, ABLE group from CMU and a group led by Ms. Sonam at AISys Lab in her current university (UofSC). This is a highly collaborative project with CMU, York University, and NASA to develop the autonomy module for the Europa lander mission. Sonam leading the designing and testing of the autonomy module on a virtual testbed from NASA Ames and a physical testbed from NASA JPL.

The aim of this project is to increase the autonomy of a mission on the surface of the OceanWATERS planet without the need for round-trip control data for human supervision. Her research focuses mainly on the integration of causality with optimal dynamic planning in self adaptive systems for autonomous OceanWATERS landers in unknown and uncertain environments. For demonstrating the capability of their autonomy she is on visit to NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL-CalTech), LA, California. Her team has successfully demonstrated baseline capabilities of autonomy on the physical and virtual testbeds and plan to continue working on the improvements in autonomy design. 

While updating to her supervisors, she said that, “It’s altogether a very good experience. I get chance to meet many researchers in various fields and experts having real flight control missions. I can attend various talks in-person here and brainstorm on various topics with people here.”