Volants (flying animals) are extraordinary creatures. We can observe amazing phenomena from them. For instance, a bald eagle can land on the tip of a tree branch with exact precision, even in a heavy thunderstorm, whereas our aerial vehicles suffer from landing on a carefully designed runway, even in mild weather conditions. A falcon can track its prey with only vision, whereas our drones struggle to track targets even with numerous sensor suites. An Arctic tern can navigate from the South to North Pole without a GPS, whereas our drones still have localization problems even with a strong GNSS. A seagull effortlessly weaves through the skies in a swarm, navigating around obstacles and fellow birds, while UAVs continue to struggle with dynamic environments and complex obstacles. My career goal is to provide the same kind of robust intelligence to our aerial robots as we see with volants.``Volants achieve this intelligence not because they are experts in fluid dynamics, control systems, or computer vision; they succeed via a continuous learning process". Traditional control theory is good at tackling systems when the physics of the systems are known, however these are not good at tackling nonlinear functions (as well as approximating them), whereas neural networks excel at approximating nonlinear functions for both perception and control. On the other hand, deep learning requires greater amounts of data to perform well, and these also suffer with the problem of over fitting. Thus I believe that integrating traditional control theory and computer vision with machine and deep learning can offer solutions for designing and deploying robust aerial robots.

• Aerial Robotics
• Uncrewed Aerial Systems
• Robot Learning
• Machine Vision
• Control Systems

"A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and install a love of learning"

I am fortunate to have a great teachers in my life. Everyone inspired me a lot, taught me a lot. Whenver I think about my mentors I always remember the quote said by Jame Levine i.e. "I was lucky that I met the right mentors and teachers at the right moment".