Bio

I hail from Tiruchirappalli (Trichy), Tamil Nadu, India. After completing my schooling at Campion Anglo-Indian Higher Secondary school, I pursued my bachelor's in instrumentation and control engineering at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Trichy. 

During my undergraduate studies, I got interested in robotics and joined the robotics club of NIT Trichy - Robotics and Machine Intelligence (RMI). RMI gave me the opportunity to work on interesting projects and learn the tools necessary to build robots.  Moreover, I got the opportunity to work with incredibly smart and insanely hardworking people, who also became my best friends for life. We also conducted workshops to teach robotics concepts to interested students, which is where I discovered my love for teaching.

To further my technical knowledge in robotics and artificial intelligence, I did a couple of internships at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. I gained valuable insight into how to conduct research and develop solutions in a rigorous way during these internships which helped me decide on where to go forward in my career. It also helped me narrow down to the field of control systems for robotics.

Having discovered my passion for research and teaching and my love for robotics and control systems, I applied to graduate school and got into the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station.  I started working as a graduate research assistant at Estimation, Decision and Planning lab with Dr. Suman Chakravorty, who introduced me to optimal control theory and on which I continue to work to date. 

In graduate school, I have mainly focused on optimal control, especially for nonlinear dynamical systems, and extending the theory to data-based/reinforcement learning applications. I initially considered finite horizon fully observed problems. Then, I extended the theory to partially observed output feedback problems. More recently, I have also developed theoretical results for infinite horizon fully observed problems to guarantee global asymptotic stability. 

Apart from my main research, I worked on several projects on the side. I worked on building an autonomous pallet jack and developed the entire navigation stack for it during my first couple of years. During my second and third years, I worked on distributed state estimation for unreliable networks. I also got the chance to work on developing reconstruction algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radars. Towards the end of my PhD,  I worked on developing the mathematical reasoning to use dynamic mode decomposition for system modeling, and its relationship to Fourier and Koopman operators. This technique was used in data-driven modeling of periodic orbits in LEO, GEO, and Cislunar space.