Teaching Assistant, AGEN 892: Applied Robotics in Agriculture and Natural Resources

Jan '25 - May '25

• Facilitated weekly hands-on lab sessions on ground and aerial robotics, guiding students through ROS-based concepts.

• Provided real-time technical support—troubleshooting UGV/UAV hardware setups, and software tools (ROS2, Python).

• Leading a team of 5 students as a class project to work on the UFArm SwiftPro robotic manipulator to pick up eggs.

Teaching Assistant, BSEN 460: Instrumentation Controls

Aug '24 - Dec '24 

• Developed and led weekly hands-on lab sessions, guiding students through LabVIEW programming and myDAQ.

• Provided technical support, troubleshooting software/hardware issues, and clarifying instrumentation concepts.

• Assessed student performance by grading lab reports, delivering detailed feedback to drive continuous improvement.

Graduate Researcher | University of Nebraska Lincoln

Aug '24 - Present

Advisor: Prof. Santosh Pitla

Working in the MAARS Lab at UNL on Digitalizing the Soil Quality Monitoring in the Roger Memorial Farm using Robotics.

Undergraduate Researcher | University of Calgary

May '23 - Present

• Working under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Souza to develop a Garbage Classification System based on Multimodal Imagery and Text Data.

• Made the pipeline for classifying the images and extracting the text data using the Pigeon library.

• Benchmarked various image classification and image captioning deep learning models using pretraining and fine-tuning both modalities.

[code] [paper]

Undergraduate Researcher | Iowa State University 

May '22 - July '22

• Worked under the supervision of Prof. Soumik Sarkar and investigated Self Supervised Multi-modal data fusion strategies using the MultiMAE model on the crop canopy reflectance data (RGB, thermal, and depth images) for calculating the wilting score of the plants.

• Worked on another project on applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) for robotic manipulation based on the Finite Element Analysis model of a Maize plant

• Volunteered in the collection of RGB, thermal, multispectral imagery, and ASD data using RGB Drone Zenmuse X5S and Hyperspectral Spectroradiometer in Muscatine Island Research Farm.

[code]

Undergraduate Researcher | IIT Kharagpur 

May '22 - July '22

• Worked under the supervision of Prof. Peeyush Soni and implemented state-of-the-art model YOLO-v7 to detect apples from RGB images and achieved map value of 90.5%. 

• Implemented modified A* algo for path planning of an Ag Bot moving in a field with trees at random locations.

• Implemented inverse kinematics in python for the Robotic Manipulation in the virtual environment in the Webots. 

[code] [paper]

Undergraduate Researcher | Purdue University

May '21 - July '21

• Worked under the supervision of Prof. Dharmendra Saraswat on determining the generalizability of object detection networks. 

• Explored various methods for training and achieving generalization of object detection networks using RGB images collected from fields with complex real-life differences.

• Examined various Data Augmentation techniques to increase the dataset and achieved an improvement in the performance. The final model is robust and can be used to map or calculate the yield of soybean plants in various real-life situations.

Undergraduate Researcher | Washington State University

May '21 - July '21

• Worked under the supervision of Prof. Lav Khot on 'Assessment of percentage of failed crop germination' i.e. Formulation of non-germination at a high throughput capacity which would guide replantation measure.

• Explored various variants of object detection model YOLOv4 to find the missing index of mulch planting i.e. the percentage of mulch plants per unit area of the field which will not lead to productivity.

• Implemented Active Learning to reduce the burden of manually annotating imagery datasets.

• Estimated the maximum resolution of testing images and correspondingly used Ground sampling distance (GSD) to calculate a range of height for the drone flight to reduce the inference time.

Undergraduate Researcher | IIT Kharagpur

March '20 - March '22

• Worked under the supervision of Dr. Debashish Chakravarty at AGV, IIT Kharagpur in the DL Trajectory Prediction team.

• Joined as a mechatronics team member and created a chassis of a 6-wheeled Planetary Rover using SolidWorks for the University Rover Challenge (URC) that can fulfill various tasks of the challenge.

• Lead DL Trajectory Prediction team with a focus on multi-modal trajectory prediction, participated in the Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenge and got our work selected in the MLRC 2021-22.

Gopali Youth Welfare Society, IIT Kharagpur

GYWS is a registered voluntary non-governmental organization run by students of IIT Kharagpur which ensures the socio-economic welfare of underprivileged sections of society.  We run a school Jagriti Vidya Mandir (JVM) near the village of Gopali focusing on providing good quality free-of-cost education to 230 children.

I was a part of the Sponsorship team which is responsible for planning and executing fundraising events and programs. Coordinated a team of ten juniors. Enhanced fund-raising methods to increase the funding for various initiatives of our NGO by contacting companies for CSR, Alumni of various premier institutes, and introducing gift-matching programs. Raise nearly 45 Lakhs per annum every year to cover the complete educational expenses of our students.

Department Representative, IIT Kharagpur

Elected for the position of UG Department Representative for the Agricultural and Food Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur, for the academic session 2021-22.

I was a member of the Undergraduate Council (UG) which acts as a liaison between students and administration to convey critical issues pertaining to academics and student welfare.

Mentored a group of juniors working in the domain of applications of AI in Agriculture and connecting juniors with the alums and seniors for knowledge sharing.